Julius German

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Memorial plaque in Vienna 19., Grinzing , Himmelstrasse 41

Julius Deutsch (born February 2, 1884 in Lackenbach , Burgenland , then the Kingdom of Hungary ; † January 17, 1968 in Vienna ) was an Austrian author, politician ( SDAP ) and member of the Austrian National Council from 1920 to 1933 . As a counterweight to conservative military organizations, he founded the Republican Protection Association .

Life

German was trained as a printer and studied in parallel at the University of Vienna Law (Dr. jur. 1908). Then he worked in the central secretariat of the SDAP, which was then located in the newly built Vorwärts building in Vienna. In 1914 he became editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung , which was also based there. 1914–1917 he had to do military service in the First World War , then he acted as a union representative in the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry . Within the Social Democrats, Deutsch was one of the few politicians who opposed the war from the start. In early 1915 he enlisted in the fortress artillery battalion No. 4 and was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve in August 1916. He was awarded the Silver Medal for Bravery, the Karl Troop Cross and the Bronze Military Merit Medal "Signum Laudis" on the ribbon of the Military Merit Cross. In November 1918 he was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve. He acted as a soldier's representative on the Italian front and, as part of his work as a trade union representative in the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry, built a stewardship structure in the Vienna garrison. These structures should prove useful in his later activities.

In the First Republic he organized the German-Austrian people's armed forces as Undersecretary of State in the State Office for Army Affairs ( State Government Renner I , November 1918 to March 1919) and as State Secretary for Army Affairs ( State Governments Renner II , Renner III and Mayr I , March 1919 to October 1920) Army of Democracy. He was one of the leading politicians of social democracy and was a member of parliament from 1919 to 1933 (formally until 1934). He was also involved in workers' sport, became president of international workers' sport ( Confédération Sportive Internationale du Travail ) and brought the Workers' Olympiads to Austria in 1931.

In 1923 he was the leading founder and chairman of the Republican Protection Association, which arose as a counterweight to the Christian Social Home Guard and was largely recruited from the former People's Army. However, the Schutzbund did not take part in a combat mission against enemies of democracy. Theodor Körner had briefly warned the party leadership in 1934 not to use the armed forces strongly inferior Schutzbund against the army of the Dollfuss dictatorship that had begun .

In the February uprising (government version) or civil war (social democratic version), the social democracy got therefore without central strategic planning or management. After the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) was banned on February 12, 1934, and the Social Democratic fighters were defeated, Deutsch fled to Brno in Czechoslovakia , accusing him of abandoning the workers. From 1936 to 1939 he fought as a general of the ultimately defeated republican troops in the Spanish Civil War .

In 1939 he came to Paris and was involved in the diplomatic mission of the Austrian Socialists (AVOES). In the course of the conquest of France by the German Wehrmacht in the spring of 1940, German, being Jewish, had to emigrate again. He ended up in the United States , where he spent the remainder of the war. In 1946 he returned (as one of only a few Jewish expellees) to Austria, where he headed the Socialist Publishing House until 1951 (see Vorwärts-Verlag ), but no longer played a role in the political events of the SPÖ .

In 1951, Deutsch resigned from his commercial functions and in the same year married the writer Adrienne Thomas , whom he had met in American exile. She came to Vienna in 1947 because of him , although Vienna would not have been her first choice and later prompted her to make the ironic remark that she might even have preferred to go to the Hottentots than to Vienna.

Julius Deutsch's honorary grave is located in the Grinzinger Friedhof (group 1, number 9) in Vienna. Adrienne Thomas-Deutsch is also buried in the same grave.

In honor of German, the residential complex at Grinzinger Allee 54 in the 19th district , his last residential district, was named Julius-Deutsch-Hof after his death .

Fonts

  • Child labor and its fight. 1907.
  • History of the Austrian trade union movement. 1908.
  • Marx and the International . In: Robert Danneberg : Karl Marx . The man and his work . Publishing house of the Association of Young Workers (Anton Jenschik), Vienna 1913, pp. 52–55.
  • From the Austrian Revolution - Military-Political Memories , Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1921
  • Anti-fascism! Proletarian defense in the struggle against fascism . Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1926, OBV .
  • Wehrmacht and Social Democracy , Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1927
  • Sport and politics: on behalf of the d. Socialist. Workers' Sport International , Berlin: JHW Dietz Nachf. 1928
  • Under red flags! From record to mass sport. In:  Vienna Social Democratic Library , year 1931, issue 34, pp. 1–24. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wsp.
  • History of the Austrian labor movement , Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1947
  • What do the socialists want? With a foreword by Adolf Schärf . Sixth edition. Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1949, OBV .
  • A long way. Life memories. Amalthea, Zurich / Leipzig / Vienna 1960
  • Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, (ed.) Gabriel Kuhn, London 2016. ISBN 978-1629631547
  • Julius Deutsch: War experiences of a peace-loving man. Records from the First World War . (Eds. Michaela Maier, Georg Spitaler) New Academic Press: Vienna 2016.

literature

Web links

Commons : Julius Deutsch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marcus Patka (Ed.): Doomsday. Jewish life and death in the First World War. Jewish Museum Vienna, Styria, Vienna / Graz 2014, ISBN 978-3-222-13434-0 , p. 229.
  2. ^ Reinhard Krammer: Austria: New Times are with us. Arnd Krüger & James Riordan (Eds.) (1996). The Story of Worker Sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, pp. 81-96. ISBN 978-0873228749
  3. ^ Information from Ingrid Schramm, Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library, from October 22, 2014
  4. ^ Knerger.de: The grave of Julius Deutsch
personal data
SURNAME German, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian author, politician (SDAP), member of the National Council
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Lackenbach
DATE OF DEATH 17th January 1968
Place of death Vienna