Josef Duchač

Josef Duchač (1990)

Duchač casting his vote in the 1990 state election

Josef Duchač (born February 19, 1938 in Bad Schlag , Czechoslovakia ) is a German CDU politician . From 1990 to 1992 he was the first Minister-President of Thuringia after German reunification.

Life

Josef Duchač was born into a German-Bohemian working - class family. At the end of the Second World War, his family was expelled from Czechoslovakia and found a new home in Gotha . After graduating from high school in 1957, Josef Duchač began studying chemistry and mathematics at the Pedagogical Institute in Mühlhausen (now part of the University of Erfurt ). After a year he broke off his studies, first worked in postal newspaper sales , then, from 1959 to 1961, as a worker at VEB Gummiwerke in Waltershausen (KOWALIT = KOmbinat WALtershausen In Thuringia, now part of ContiTech AG , Hanover). In 1961 he resumed his studies at the engineering school for rubber and plastic technology in Fürstenwalde / Spree , Brandenburg , which he completed in 1964 with an examination as a chemical engineer.

In 1964 he became a shift engineer at VEB Gummiwerke in Waltershausen. Duchač went through a career here until 1986, up to operations manager. At the same time, after a distance learning at the TU Dresden and the TH Leuna-Merseburg, he passed his exams as a graduate engineer-economist in 1973 .

1957 Ducháč joined the CDU of the GDR one. From 1986 to 1989 he was deputy district chairman of the CDU in Gotha, and moved from VEB Gummiwerke in Waltershausen (KOWALIT) to the council of the Gotha district , where he was responsible for the housing sector. After the management of the VEB Gummiwerke in Waltershausen, which had been set up by the SED during the turbulence of the time of reunification , Duchač returned to his old place of work and took over the management of the plant again for half a year. He became increasingly involved in politics, rose to become district chairman of the CDU in Gotha in October 1989 and became a member of the board of the GDR CDU in December 1989.

On June 11, 1990, Duchač took over the district administrative authority of Erfurt as a government plenipotentiary ( government de Maizière ) (predecessor as chairman of the district council of Erfurt: Arthur Swatek ). When the Land of Thuringia was reestablished with the Land Introduction Act of July 22, 1990 (see History of Thuringia and the history of the administrative structure of Thuringia ), on August 24, 1990, Lothar de Maizière, the last GDR Prime Minister, made Duchač spokesman for this newly formed country appointed. From October 1, 1990, he acted as the state representative of the state of Thuringia, which was reconstituted on October 3, 1990.

In the first free, democratic state elections on October 14, 1990 , the CDU ran with Josef Duchač as the top candidate and emerged as the strongest party by far with 45.5 percent (44 of the 89 seats), followed by the SPD 22.8 percent (21 seats), the PDS with 9.7 percent (nine seats), the FDP with 9.3 percent (nine seats) and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen with 6.5 percent (six seats). On November 8, 1990 Josef Duchač was elected Prime Minister of a CDU-FDP coalition government (see Duchač cabinet ).

On January 23, 1992, he resigned from his post because he could no longer be sure of the confidence of his group. This was preceded by allegations that Duchač worked for the Ministry for State Security during the time of the GDR . He had survived a first motion of no confidence by the SPD in mid-December 1991. On November 30, 1992, he also resigned from his state parliament mandate. The coalition elected Bernhard Vogel , the former Prime Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate , as the new head of government.

Josef Duchač then took over the management of various missions abroad of the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation , first in Lisbon ( Portugal ), later in St. Petersburg ( Russia ) and Budapest ( Hungary ).

Josef Duchač lives in retirement in Birkenwerder . He is blind after a stroke.

literature

Interview in:

• Holger Zürch (ed.): With free people on free land . 15 years of the Thuringian Parliament in retrospect, former MPs from the founding years in the Free State of Thuringia. Self-publication by Engelsdorfer Verlag , Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-939404-01-2 , p. 51-63 . - The interview with Josef Duchac can also be found online at Qucosa from page 24 in the free e-book version of this book.
• Conversation in: Holger Zürch: Thuringia's early years. Talks with Thuringian MPs about their time in the state parliament between 1990 and 1999. Erfurt 2004, ISBN 3-931426-85-8 (= Volume 20 of the Thuringia yesterday & today series , published by the Thuringia Regional Center for Civic Education )
• Short biography for:  Duchac, Josef . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Josef Duchač , in Internationales Biographisches Archiv 25/1992 from June 8, 1992 (lm), in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Josef Duchač  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Thuringian State Chancellery (Ed.): Thuringian heads of government 1920–2003 ; 2007 (PDF; 1.74 MB)

Footnotes

1. ^ Bernhard Post , Volker Wahl (Ed.), Dieter Marek (Red.): Thuringia Manual. Territory, constitution, parliament, government and administration in Thuringia from 1920 to 1995 (series of publications by the Thuringian Central State Archives Weimar ). Böhlau, Weimar 1999, ISBN 3-7400-0962-4 , p. 64.
2. ↑ Josef Duchač: “I've always had a huge amount of ambition”. In: Holger Zürch: With free people on free ground. 15 years of the Thuringian Parliament in retrospect, former MPs from the founding years in the Free State of Thuringia . Engelsdorfer Verlag, Leipzig 2006, pp. 51–63, here p. 51.
3. ↑ Josa Mania-Schlegel: "Josef, that would not have happened to you". Josef Duchač was Thuringia's first post-reunification prime minister. . In: Die Zeit im Osten , March 5, 2020, accessed on April 18, 2020.