Ludwig Kühn (politician)

Ludwig Kühn (born June 22, 1893 in Venusberg , † December 21, 1977 in Karl-Marx-Stadt ) was a German communist. He was one of the founders of the KPD in Chemnitz and was a confidante of Heinrich Brandler . After the Second World War, Kühn acted for some time as President of the Saxony Chamber of Crafts.

Life

Kühn grew up as the son of a carpenter in the Saxon Ore Mountains . He learned the locksmith trade. At the age of 18 Kühn became a member of the SPD and was one of the founders of the workers' youth movement in Chemnitz. In the industrial city of Saxony, Kühn came into contact with the two full-time social democratic union leaders Heinrich Brandler and Fritz Heckert , whose opposing views on the social democratic truce policy he joined at the beginning of the First World War. As a result, Kühn became a leader in the Chemnitz Spartakus group, as he also experienced the war as a soldier and from 1917 as an armaments worker. During the November Revolution of 1918, Kühn was a member of the Chemnitz Workers 'and Soldiers' Council and he was one of the founders of the KPD in Chemnitz at the beginning of 1919. After he was dismissed in his old profession as a locksmith in 1921, Kühn got a job as a full-time KDP -Functional within the Erzgebirge-Vogtland district management. At times he was secretary of the Chemnitz subdistrict and head of organization of the KPD district, whose head office was in Chemnitz. The political leader of this KPD district in Saxony during Kühn's activity as a functionary was Robert Siewert , who was also a supporter of Brandler. In 1923, Kühn resigned from all of his full-time party functions after internal party disputes, which revolved primarily around the failed German October and saw him in a right-wing party stream. He now devoted himself to professional life and relied on the emerging radio, which from 1923 also spread in Germany. Kühn started his own business as a radio dealer and ran a specialist radio shop. It was not until 1928/29 that he became politically active again and, after the founding of the KPO, worked again with Heinrich Brandler for some time. At the latest when Brandler fled after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Kühn's political commitment died out. In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht for a short time in order to work at the Kiel Navy shipyard from 1940 as part of a service obligation until after the end of the war in 1945. In August 1945 Kühn first returned to Chemnitz. Shortly afterwards he found a job as a radio mechanic in the state news office, some time later he headed the radio department of the state broadcaster Dresden. In 1947 Kühn was elected President of the Saxony Chamber of Crafts by the Saxon State Parliament. As part of this activity, Kühn was also a member of the Provisional People's Chamber in the faction of the cooperatives. In 1953, after the state chamber of handicrafts was dissolved, he moved to VEB Fernmelde-Anlagenbau Dresden, where he acted as plant manager until his retirement in 1959.

Private

Kühn's wife Gertrud was Heinrich Brandler's first wife from 1917 to 1932. Born in Chemnitz, she had been a member of the USPD since 1917, and in 1920 she joined the KPD. From 1921 to 1924 she worked as a secretary in the KPD headquarters in Berlin. After Brandler was dismissed as KPD chairman, she followed her husband to Moscow and lived with him from 1925 to 1927 in the famous Hotel Lux . In 1928 the couple returned to Germany and Gertrud Brandler worked for the Soviet trade agency in Berlin in 1928/29. At the end of the twenties, Gertrud Brandler separated from her husband and from then on lived with Ludwig Kühn, in whose radio business she worked from 1939 to 1944. In 1946, the KPD member from the very beginning also became a member of the SED. At the latest when her former husband Heinrich Brandler returned to West Germany in 1949 and, as the leading head of the workers' policy group, propagated a policy that distinguished itself from the SED, Gertrud Kühn was ostracized within the SED. As part of the party purges in the early 1950s, she was expelled from the SED as a Trotskyist.

Honors

• Ludwig-Kühn-Straße in Chemnitz is named after Kühn to this day
• Patriotic Order of Merit in silver

Web link

• Short biography for:  Ludwig Kühn . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Neues Deutschland from July 5, 1973 p. 2