Joseph Herzfeld

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Joseph Herzfeld

Joseph Herzfeld (born December 18, 1853 in Neuss , † July 27, 1939 in Klobenstein in the municipality of Ritten near Bozen ) was a German politician (SPD, USPD, KPD).

Live and act

Youth and Life in the United States, 1853--1885

Herzfeld was born as the eldest of four sons of a Jewish factory owner from Westphalia. Herzfeld's youngest brother later became known as a writer under the pseudonym Franz Held , his nephews were the artists Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield . Herzfeld's father, a Democrat and Republican who raised his sons in the spirit of the Enlightenment, was friends with Karl Marx , who frequented the family home as a guest.

Herzfeld attended high school in Düsseldorf from 1862 to 1871 . He then worked in his father's factory from 1871 to 1872. He then worked as a trainee in a bank in Düsseldorf until 1874.

As a young man, Herzfeld moved to the United States in 1873 for reasons that could no longer be reconstructed . There he lived for a few years as a merchant in New York City . He began vocational retraining in 1878 and studied law at Columbia College Law School in New York City from 1878 to 1880. He then earned his living as a lawyer ( attorney and counselor at law ) in New York from 1881 to 1885 . During his American years, Herzfeld made numerous trips through the United States, Canada and Cuba , which was then a Spanish colony.

Life in the Empire (1885 to 1919)

In 1885 Herzfeld returned to Germany. In order to gain a foothold on the German job market as a lawyer, he studied German law for two years from 1885 to 1887 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and obtained the title of Dr. jur . In 1892 Herzfeld, who had been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) since 1887 , settled as a lawyer in Berlin.

In the Reichstag elections of June 1898 , Herzfeld was elected as a candidate of the SPD for constituency 5 (Rostock-Doberan of the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin) in the parliament of the German Empire , to which he initially belonged until January 1907. After a five-year absence from parliament, Herzfeld was able to regain his old mandate in the Reichstag elections of January 1912 . This time he was a member of the Reichstag until November 1918. At that time, Herzfeld was one of the small but influential group of lawyers within the SPD parliamentary group, comprising seven members. In parliament, Herzfeld usually spoke on the occasion of the negotiation of the budget for the administration of justice. He also often criticized the backward suffrage of the Principality of Mecklenburg , which at that time was still governed by corporate principles. Otherwise he was rather inconspicuous in parliament: "Hezfeld's parliamentary achievements do not reflect the diversity of his education, his experiences and his life in different countries."

In August 1914, at the beginning of the First World War , Herzfeld campaigned in the SPD parliamentary group for the rejection of war credits . In the end, however, he complied with the wishes of the SPD leadership and agreed with the other SPD members to approve the loans. During the war, Herzfeld came into ever greater opposition to the leaders of his party. Unlike the majority of his party and in particular the leadership of the SPD in the Reichstag, Herzfeld voted in parliament from around 1916 against the approval of further loans to finance the war. In 1915 he took part in the international conference of representatives of the opposition minorities within the socialist parties in Zimmerwald, Switzerland. In 1916 he was a member of the Social Democratic Working Group . In 1917 Herzfeld participated in the founding of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), a secessionist new party that emerged from the left wing of the SPD, which now split from the party over the issue of the approval of war credits.

After the November Revolution of 1918, Herzfeld was an alderman in the Reich Office of the Interior until December .

Life in the Weimar Republic and in Exile (1919 to 1939)

In the Reichstag elections of June 1920 returned Herzfeld as a candidate of the Independent Socialists for the constituency 7 (Mecklenburg) in the Reichstag back. During this first legislative period of the parliament of the Weimar Republic , which was founded in 1919 , Herzfeld moved to the Reichstag faction of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In the Reichstag elections of May 1924 , Herzfeld stood as a candidate for the KPD for constituency 37 (Mecklenburg). He was then a member of parliament until the end of the short second legislative period of the Weimar Republic in December 1924. Parallel to his work in parliament, Herzfeld distinguished himself as the author of countless newspaper and magazine articles in the left-wing press.

After the KAG crisis, Herzfeld was, along with Emil Eichhorn and Clara Zetkin, the only known pre-war Social Democrat who remained in the KPD. As a communist, he left no doubt about his opposition to the Weimar state: "As a communist [I] do not have the task of defending the constitutional republican form of government, the definition of which the Minister of Justice gave us today."

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, Herzfeld went into exile in Switzerland as a well-known communist . In 1934 he went to South Tyrol , where he died in 1939. One of the reasons for the decision to emigrate was probably that Herzfeld was considered a racial Jew due to his descent according to the National Socialist view and was therefore ostracized in two ways in the Nazi state. Herzfeld himself saw Judaism, however, only as a religious community from which he had renounced as an atheist as a young adult.

A small remaining estate from Herzfeld is in the main archive of the Historical Commission in Berlin in, AdsD. It has a length of 0.1 linear meters and contains ten newspaper clippings and an article that he wrote from 1918 to 1919.

Today, Joseph-Herzfeld-Strasse in Schwerin and Rostock is a reminder of his life and work.

Fonts

  • Mecklenburg constitution , slea
  • Farm workers in Mecklenburg , s. l. e. a.

literature

  • Klaus Baudis: Collection of materials for the 150th birthday of Joseph Herzfeld . Schwerin 2003.
  • Heinz Meiritz: Dr. Joseph Herzfeld, 1853-1939 . In: We fulfill your legacy. On the history of the labor movement in Mecklenburg . Schwerin 1969, pp. 17-28.
  • H. Naumann: Joseph Herzfeld as a member of the Reichstag of the KPD . In: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, Greifswald 1980.
  • Herzfeld, Joseph . 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 .
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Weber: The change of German communism. The Stalinization of the KPD in the ... , 1969, p. 159.
  2. ↑ For the individual elections see Carl-Wilhelm Reibel: Handbook of the Reichstag elections 1890–1918. Alliances, results, candidates (= handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 15). Half volume 2, Droste, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 978-3-7700-5284-4 , pp. 1372-1375.
  3. ↑ Ludwig Heid: Oskar Cohn. A Socialist and Zionist in the Empire and in the Weimar Republic , 2002, p. 139. Besides Herzfeld, this also included Hugo Haase , Karl Liebknecht , Otto Landsberg , Ludwig Frank , Oskar Cohn and Wolfgang Heine .
  4. ^ Jews in public life in Germany , p. 491.
  5. ^ Stenographic reports of the Reichstag, vol. 356, p. 8450, speech given on July 11, 1922.
personal data
SURNAME Herzfeld, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, USPD, KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1853
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuss
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1939
Place of death Klobenstein , Ritten municipality , South Tyrol , Italy