Karl Mommer

Karl Mommer receives the Federal Cross of Merit from Eugen Gerstenmaier

Karl Mommer (born March 13, 1910 in Wevelinghoven , † September 3, 1990 in Bonn ) was a German SPD politician .

Life and work

After graduating from high school, Mommer studied philosophy, economics and history in Cologne , Berlin , Graz and Vienna . After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he took part in illegal actions and was sentenced to 21 months in prison for this. After serving his sentence, he fled to Belgium . He received his doctorate in social sciences under Hendrik de Man in Brussels in 1935 with his thesis “The young Marx and the state”. He then worked as a private tutor and accountant. During the Second World War he was interned in France in 1940/41 and then worked as an independent farmer in the south of France.

In 1946 Mommer returned to Germany and became a consultant for social policy and refugee issues at the State Council of the American Occupation Area in Stuttgart . From 1947 to 1949 he was a consultant in the German Bureau for Peace Issues, which was also based in Stuttgart.

In addition, from 1976 to 1979, he was the first German to be President of the Atlantic Treaty Association .

Karl Mommer is the father of Bernard Mommer , Venezuela's former deputy energy and oil minister . The Karl Mommer Prize of the SPD district association in Ludwigsburg is named after him.

Political party

Karl Mommer, whose father had already been active in the KPD, joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1930 as a student . During his exile in Brussels, he initially kept in touch with the leadership of the exiled KPD there, to which his sister Elvira also belonged. When the latter was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1938 and deported to a gulag , he broke with communism in 1938 and joined the SPD.

At the end of the 1940s Mommer was a member of the state executive committee of the SPD in Württemberg-Baden . In the 1950s he was a member of the SPD's federal executive committee, where he was responsible for contacts with the state association in Saarland, which was banned until 1955 . He was assigned to the right wing SPD and criticized in particular the policies of the GDR and the other communist states.

MP

Karl Mommer speaks in the Bundestag during the second reading of the Paris Treaties

Mommer was a member of the Economic Council of the Bizone in 1948/49 . He was a member of the German Bundestag from its first election in 1949 to 1969. In 1953 , 1961 and 1965 he was directly elected in the Ludwigsburg constituency, otherwise he entered parliament via the SPD's state list. Mommer was from 1949 to March 21, 1952 chairman of the organizing committee of the Bundestag. From May 10, 1957 until the end of the second legislative term , he was deputy chairman of the special committee “Common Market / Euratom” . He then functioned from 1957 to December 14, 1966 as Parliamentary Managing Director of the SPD parliamentary group and was then Vice President of the Bundestag until October 20, 1969 .

Mommer was temporarily a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the WEU and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe , where in 1957 he headed the "Committee on Relations with National Parliaments and the Public" .

Honors

• 1965: Large Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1969: Great Cross of Merit with Star and Shoulder Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany

Publications

• American Legislative Bodies. Lecture from January 9, 1950. Printed in: Michael F. Feldkamp : Karl Mommer and the beginnings of the German Bundestag. In: Julia von Blumenthal , Helmar Schöne (Hrsg.): Research on parliamentarism in Germany. Results and perspectives 40 years after the publication of Gerhard Loewenberg's standard work on the German Bundestag (= Studies on Parliamentarism. Vol. 13). Nomos-Verlags-Gesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2009, ISBN 978-3-8329-4621-0 , pp. 245-255.
• The difficult everyday life of the parliamentarian. In: Documents. Volume 3, 1968, pp. 215-218.
• Houses of Parliament. In: Perspectives. Social Democratic Policy in the Transition to the Seventies. Explained by 21 Social Democrats. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1969, pp. 159–162.

literature

• Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, pp. 188ff.
• Michael F. Feldkamp : Karl Mommer and the beginnings of the German Bundestag. In: Julia von Blumenthal , Helmar Schöne (Hrsg.): Research on parliamentarism in Germany. Results and perspectives 40 years after the publication of Gerhard Loewenberg's standard work on the German Bundestag (= Studies on Parliamentarism. Vol. 13). Nomos-Verlags-Gesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2009, ISBN 978-3-8329-4621-0 , pp. 231-256.
• Munzinger , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 45/1990 of October 29, 1990 (lm)
• Mommer, Karl . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Mommer  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Karl Mommer in the catalog of the German National Library