Joseph Berkowitz Kohn

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Joseph Berkowitz Kohn , operating under the code name Brak , (born April 15, 1841 in Łęczyca , † April 4, 1905 in Hamburg ) was a businessman , teacher and politician .

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Joseph Berkowitz Kohn was the son of a merchant who, like his maternal grandmother, spoke Polish. His ancestors took an active part in public life and encouraged Joseph Berkowitz Kohn early on to join the national-Polish resistance movement directed against the Russification policy of the Tsar. After the failed January uprising in 1863, he fled under the code name "Brak". In 1864, Kohn settled in Hamburg, where he joined the Jewish community and within a short time worked successfully as an independent businessman. Here he married Auguste, née Gabrielsen, from Altona , with whom he had numerous children.

As an active member in associations of Polish emigrants, Kohn belonged to the B'nai B'rith lodge . From 1874 he gave speeches on the Reichstag elections for the General German Workers' Association . He was involved in several associations for further training for workers, where he taught history, bookkeeping and economics, and served on the board of an association in Eimsbüttel . In elected positions, he mostly held lectures and training courses in the Hamburg Citizens' Association , which had existed since 1886, and in the SPD . He mostly talked about training courses and lectures. Kohn was considered anti-authoritarian and particularly rejected the state's exercise of power in Prussia and Russia . His criticism was also directed against the SPD executive committee in Berlin, who had taken over the Hamburg cooperative printing company Auer & Co. in 1890 without involving the previous owners.

As elected chairman of the press commission of the Hamburg SPD, Kohn controlled the publishing house and the Hamburger Echo, which served as a party organ, for a long time . The merchant supported social democratic cooperatives and ran the business of the bakery cooperative after they had problems. From 1900 until the end of his life he was a member of the supervisory board of the consumer, construction and savings association “Production” . Towards the end of his life he wrote his memoirs, in which he mostly cited earlier diary entries. After his death in April 1905, a non-detachable anti-Semitic obituary appeared in the Hamburger Echo , in which the businessman was described as a “little boy”. The political police were astonished to find that both Jewish rites and social democratic symbols could be seen at his funeral.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Kohn, Joseph Berkowitz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brak (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Merchant, teacher and politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1841
PLACE OF BIRTH Łęczyca
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 1905
Place of death Hamburg