Karl Plättner

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Karl Plättner (born January 3, 1893 in Opperode / Ballenstedt , † June 4, 1945 in Freising ) was a German communist , militant social revolutionary and author .

biography

Youth and education

Inside cover sheet of Eros in the penitentiary

Karl Plättner was born in a poor family in Opperode in the Harz Mountains. He completed elementary school and an apprenticeship in an ironworks and worked as a moulder . As a youth he already fought with the authorities and was arrested for "insulting". Plättner went on a hike after a year of work. In 1910 he settled in Hamburg and joined the SPD , where he became head of the youth association and a member of its state executive in 1912. At the beginning of the First World War he distanced himself from the nationalist politics of the SPD. He resigned from the SPD in 1914.

The way to the KPD

As a conscript soldier, Plättner was injured in the war in 1915 and discharged unfit for duty at the end of 1915. From then on he had three crippled fingers, so he had to give up his job as a moulder and worked as an assistant clerk at the local health insurance fund until 1917 . He continued to agitate against the war and was initially active in the opposition proletarian and also illegal youth movement. In 1917 he was responsible for the newspaper “Proletarian Youth”. In 1917 he organized gatherings of socialist youth in northern Germany and became involved with the left-wing radicals, whose party he helped to prepare. In September 1917 he was arrested for distributing Liebknecht leaflets and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was liberated in 1918 as part of the November Revolution.

In 1918 he was a co-founder of the Dresden branch of the International Communists of Germany (IKD). In the same year he took part in the founding conference of the KPD (Spartakusbund) .

In January 1919 he became chairman of the KPD Northwest. After the proclamation of the Bremen Council Republic on January 10, 1919, he had no function in the Council Government, but was a member of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council . During this time he stood out for his militancy: for example, he demanded that for every Spartakist murdered in Berlin, one SPD leader from Bremen should be shot. As a result, he also isolated himself in his party. In 1920 he was one of the founding members of the KAPD . When the Bremen Soviet Republic was militarily crushed on February 4, 1919, he had to flee to Berlin.

Militant leader

In March 1919 Plättner took part in armed fighting by actionist forces in Berlin. He was therefore briefly imprisoned from September to November 1919. As a KPD agitator, he then spoke in Saxony-Anhalt. He also took part in the fighting in the Ruhr area after the Kapp Putsch in March and April 1920.

In April 1920 he was a founding member of the even more radical Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). As early as mid-1920, he and his group had been organizing robberies on banks, post offices and collieries according to the Marxist motto of " expropriating the expropriators".

During the March fighting in Central Germany in 1921, Plättner was one of the decidedly militant leaders of the revolting workers together with Max Hoelz and tried to promote the class struggle directly through radical, direct actions - including bomb attacks and other robberies . Alongside Hoelz, Plättner was the most important combat group leader.

After the failure of the uprising, he tried to convert the struggle to secret, individual actions and robbery. According to the Reich Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order , Plättner was the “actual leader and organizer” of the “Supreme Action Council of the KAPD”, which “in practice is a gang of criminals”. He was wanted as a criminal and finally arrested on February 3, 1922 and sentenced to ten years in prison. The KPD distanced itself from him and these forms of actionism, which they called " Bakunism ".

Imprisoned from 1922 to 1928

After his release in 1928, Plättner rejoined the KPD. His prison book Eros, published in 1929, caused a sensation in the prison . An illuminating of the gender plight of the prisoners in which Plättner expressed himself very openly on subjects such as masturbation and homosexuality that were unspoken in the labor movement at the time. The inspiration for this work was the book Eros im Bareldraht by Hans Otto Henel , a book consisting of several stories, which reports on the misery of love in times of war and illuminates the sexual needs of soldiers at the front during the First World War. These 17 life and love runs are the mildest of over a hundred that Henel selected. In the preface to this little book, which is “Not a preface - just a letter!”, Henel writes: For example, no one has dared to tell mothers, women and sisters the truth about Eros in prison camps or on warships that have been at sea for months, etc., the truth of which they would be horrified. "

Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham from the Institute for Sexology in Berlin wrote the foreword to this report and advocated “conjugal visits” in order to reduce sexual tension in prison. Friedrich Lichtneker , author and dramaturge at the Volkstheater in Vienna , created the play of the same name from Plättner's book, which premiered on November 23, 1929 in an unknown location. It was staged by Max Oppenheimer at the United Theaters in Breslau (Lobe and Thaliatheater) between 1928 and 1930 .

In the concentration camp

Politically, Plättner developed into an opponent of Stalinism and withdrew increasingly disappointed from politics. Nevertheless, he was soon arrested in the Nazi state and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp .

The book Voices from Buchenwald reports on Karl Plättner's memories from Ernst Federn: “While reading the memoirs [by Ernst Federn] I came across the anarchist Karl Plättner, one of the leaders of the Central German uprising who worked in the wood yard In 1944 he was sent 'on transport' to the Majdanek extermination camp, which was to be followed by an odyssey from camp to camp ”.

Karl Plättner died, weakened and ill, in 1945 shortly after the liberation from the concentration camp. Karl Plättner is buried in the war cemetery on the Nagelberg in the Middle Franconian town of Treuchtlingen .

Works

  • The foundation and organization of the social revolution , Magdeburg 1919 / Reprint: Karin-Kramer-Verlag 1973 under the title The social revolution .
  • Captured. 30 political amnesties in July report on their experiences in German penitentiaries / processing a. with e. Introduction provided by Karl Plättner. Edited by the Central Association d. Red Help of Germany, Berlin: Mopr-Verlag, 1928.
  • The Central German gang leader , Berlin: Asy-Verlag, 1930.
  • Eros in prison. Longing cries of tortured people for love. An illumination of the prisoners 'sexual distress, processed on the basis of personal experiences, observations and messages in eight years' imprisonment . Foreword by Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham,
    1st edition: Mopr-Verlag, Berlin 1929;
    2nd edition: Witte, Hannover 1930;
    French translation: Felix Abraham (Ed.): Les Perversions sexuelles. D'après l'enseignement du Magnus Hirschfeld, texts français du Pierre Vachet , Productions de Paris, Paris 1969 (Bibliothèque universitaire et scientifique).

Movie

Karl Plättner worked on the film:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Kuckuk : Karl Plättner and his circular of February 28, 1919 to the Northwest District of the KPD . In: Bremisches Jahrbuch , Volume 63, p. 98, Bremen 1985.
  2. ↑ ibid., Pp. 99-101.
  3. ↑ ibid., Pp. 102-103.
  4. ↑ Robert Stingle: The German "time piece" 1928-1933 ; Wisconsin 1979; P. 122.
  5. ↑ Ronny Loewy, Hans-Michael Bock: Biography Max Oppenheimer ( Memento of the original from December 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.filmportal.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , filmportal.de, accessed: January 28, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Plättner, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist, social revolutionary and author
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Opperode
DATE OF DEATH June 4, 1945
Place of death Freising