Josef Brisch

Josef Brisch , also Joseph Brisch , (born April 4, 1889 in Hüttendorf , † February 14, 1952 in Dormagen ) was a German civil servant, trade unionist and politician .

Life

Josef Brisch did an apprenticeship as a bricklayer after primary school . He spent the First World War as a soldier in the Navy . After the end of the war he became party secretary of the SPD in December 1918 , and one year later editor in Katowice . In the context of the referendum in Upper Silesia , he was the representative of the German commission and a member of the voting committee. From August 1922, he was a laborer with the Government Opole, from April 1925 at the District Office Delitzsch . In April 1926 he became the regional council Dusseldorf offset with intermediate leave for the Ministry of Labor . On October 15, 1927 he was appointed arbitrator in the arbitration district of Westphalia and on September 1, 1929 director of the Dortmund Oberversicherungsamt .

On January 21, 1930 in Solingen the left majority of the city council elected the KPD functionary Hermann Weber with the votes of the SPD, KPD and KPO as mayor of the city and thus the first elected mayor of the "Groß-Solingen" existing since 1929. However, Weber's election did not receive the legally required confirmation from the SPD-led Prussian State Ministry , as the latter refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to the state order. Therefore, the election result was reversed and instead Brisch was appointed as acting head of administration; the SPD faction in the city council had speculated on this, as it did not have enough seats to get its own candidate through. Two months later, the State Department tried to get Brisch officially elected, but Weber won the majority again. This second election was also canceled and Brisch installed as Lord Mayor. This appointment was definitively confirmed by the Prussian state government in January 1931 and Brisch's term of office was set at twelve years. As the only Lord Mayor of the Rhine Province from 1900 to 1945, Brisch had no academic qualifications, but was qualified for a higher administrative office. When he was inaugurated, the communists threw rotten eggs in protest. Brisch was the only Social Democratic Lord Mayor of the Rhine Province, but did not owe the office to an election, but to an appointment by the State Ministry.

Due to a desperate budget situation, rising unemployment figures and a lack of support from the city council, the new mayor was only able to administer the city with the help of emergency ordinances and rigorous austerity measures, which largely undermined local self-government. Due to his authoritarian measures, however, Brisch came into conflict with his own party, the SPD, which therefore initiated a party expulsion procedure against him, which was not concluded until the "seizure of power" by the National Socialists.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Brisch was briefly arrested and on March 10, 1933, he was "on leave" as mayor. His dismissal followed on August 20, 1933 on the basis of Section 4 of the Professional Civil Service Act . The discriminatory paragraph denied the suitability of the dismissed as civil servants, as their loyalty to the state was permanently in doubt because of their political activities. In the following years, as a devout Catholic, he joined the Catholic organization Missions-Verkehrs-Arbeitsgemeinschaft (MIVA), where numerous unemployed former central politicians had found shelter, and thus had contacts with the Cologne district . Brisch belonged to the same parish as Bernhard Letterhaus and Nikolaus Groß and arranged contacts with social democrats like Wilhelm Leuschner and Carl Severing .

In 1945, Josef Brisch was initially appointed by the Allies in Cologne as head of human resources, but retired after a short time because he was one of the few social democrats in the administration who had "given up the fight against the Adenauer clique ". He was again appointed Lord Mayor of Solingen until the communist Albert Müller was appointed in 1946. Brisch later became a member of the board of the German Trade Union Federation , where he made a name for himself as a proponent of a return to unrestricted collective bargaining . In 1952 he was killed in a traffic accident.

literature

• Horst Romeyk: The leading state and municipal administrators of the Rhine Province 1816-1945 . (= Publications of the Society for Rhenish History. LXIX). Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-7585-4 , p. 380f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Volker Wünderich: Workers' Movement and Self- Administration . KPD and local politics in the Weimar Republic. With the example of Solingen . Wuppertal 1980.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Ralf Rogge, Armin Schulte, Kerstin Warncke: Solingen. Big city years 1929-2004 . Edited by the Solingen City Archives and the Solinger Tageblatt . Wartberg-Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-8313-1459-4 .
3. ↑ Hermann Weber on home.wtal.de
4. ↑ Romeyk, pp. 53, 254.
5. ↑ 1931: J. Brisch appointed mayor. on: solinger-tageblatt.de , June 5, 2009.
6. ^ Horst Romeyk: Administrative and administrative history of the Rhine province 1914-1945 (= publications of the Society for Rhenish History. LXIII). Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1985, ISBN 3-7700-7552-8 , p. 325.
7. ^ Romeyk, p. 275.
8. ↑ Vera Bücker: The Cologne Circle and its concept for a Germany after Hitler. on: kas.de , p. 54. (PDF; 3.7 MB)
9. ↑ Reinhold Zilch , Bärbel Holtz (edit.): The protocols of the Prussian State Ministry 1817–1934 / 38. Vol. 12 / II. In: Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): Acta Borussica . New episode. Olms-Weidmann, Hildesheim 2003, p. 536. ( Online ; PDF 2.2 MB).
10. ↑ Georg Bönisch: 1945: Crash into the bottomless. on: spiegel.de , April 22, 1985.
11. ↑ Jürgen Nautz: The restoration of collective bargaining autonomy in West Germany after the Second World War. In: Archives for Social History. 31, 1991, p. 188. (PDF; 5.2 MB)
12. ↑ The Law of Laws. on: handelsblatt.com , April 17, 2006.