Ludwig Landmann

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Ludwig Landmann

Ludwig Landmann (born May 18, 1868 in Mannheim , † March 5, 1945 in Voorburg , Netherlands ) was a liberal German local politician of the Weimar Republic . During the German Empire, Landmann belonged first to the National Socialists , then to the Progressive People's Party and, after 1918, to the German Democratic Party . From 1924 to 1933 he was Lord Mayor of Frankfurt am Main .

Life

Grave in the main cemetery in Frankfurt am Main

Compatriot completed after graduation at the Mannheim school studying law in Heidelberg, Berlin and Munich. In 1894 he started working for the Mannheim city administration as a legal assistant. He was appointed close associate of Lord Mayor Otto Beck (1846-1908) and in 1898 city syndic . He also held lectures at the commercial college and in 1917 the University of Heidelberg awarded him an honorary doctorate. Twice, in the seasons 1912/13 and 1914/15, he also took over the interim management of the Nationaltheater Mannheim . The mayor, Theodor Kutzer , elected in 1913, wanted to set up a fourth mayor post for Landmann, but the city council rejected this. When Kutzer wanted to transfer part of his area of ​​responsibility to Landmann, there were again differences with the city council, whereupon Landmann resigned.

On October 26, 1916, he was elected Head of Department for Economics, Transport and Housing in Frankfurt am Main . Shortly before that, Landmann had resigned from the Jewish community and became non-denominational. As a department head, he developed his communal political conception on economic and housing policy in a series of memoranda, which he later oriented himself towards. This included, among other things, the revival of the Frankfurt trade fair, which was lost in the 19th century .

In 1919 he joined the Democratic Party . On October 2, 1924, he was elected Lord Mayor of the City of Frankfurt as the successor to Georg Voigt in a battle vote with 36 to 25 votes .

On the day before the National Socialist victory in the local elections on March 12, 1933, he was threatened to leave office and submitted his resignation. He was succeeded on March 13th by Friedrich Krebs ( NSDAP ).

Landmann then moved from Frankfurt to Berlin . Because of his Jewish origins, he was subjected to harassment (see History of Anti-Semitism up to 1945 # National Socialism ). Among other things, the new magistrate withdrew his pension payments in June 1933 on the grounds that “The Jude Landmann” had placed enormous burdens on the city through his “megalomaniac management”. On instructions from the local authority, the city had to pay out his retirement benefits again from November 1933.

Towards the end of his life, Landmann found himself increasingly in material need. Illnesses, the Jewish property tax  and finally the Reich flight tax left him almost destitute. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, he fled to the Netherlands, his wife's home. After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, relatives and friends hid him in order to save him from deportation . On March 5, 1945, he died in hiding of malnutrition and heart failure .

plant

Commemorative plaque for farmer on his house in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen
Rhein-Mainischer Städtkranz, Landmann's regional political concept

Ludwig Landmanns began his term of office as Lord Mayor in an economically difficult time. The November Revolution after the end of the First World War , the temporary French occupation of Frankfurt in 1919/20 and the inflation up to 1923 had led to social tensions, which at times resulted in street riots. Significant foundation assets, including that of Frankfurt University , had been lost due to inflation, so that the city had to accept its obligations. At the same time, there was a lack of convincing concepts for the further development of the city, which had flourished for 25 years until 1914 and threatened to be sidelined after the end of the war.

In 1925, Landmann commissioned city planning officer Ernst May and treasurer Bruno Asch with the urban development program Neues Frankfurt . As a settlement officer with extensive powers, May built around 12,000 apartments by 1932, primarily for workers and employees, including the Bruchfeldstrasse , Praunheim , Bornheimer Hang , Römerstadt , Westhausen , Heimatsiedlung and Hellerhofsiedlung settlements . For this he brought famous architects and designers to Frankfurt. The municipal stock building company for small apartments since 1922 , but also the Nassauische Heimstätte , which Landmann brought to Frankfurt in 1925 , acted as property developers and investors .

Another focus of Landmann's was regional policy. To improve cooperation in the Rhine-Main area , which at that time was divided between the states of Prussia , Hesse and Bavaria , he developed the concept of the Rhine-Main city circle with Frankfurt as its center shortly after taking office . Decisive for future development should not be the national borders, but the traffic and economic flows in the region. An important element in this was the development of an efficient network of expressways. In 1926, Landmann was the patron of the founding of the HaFraBa association in Frankfurt with the aim of building a motorway from Hamburg via Frankfurt to Basel.

In addition, the Landmann era saw important infrastructure measures. In 1924, the scheduled air service from Frankfurt-Rebstock airport began , which in 1925 already handled 5500 passengers in 2357 flights and became an important hub in the network of Deutsche Luft-Hansa , founded in 1926 . The first Workers' Olympics took place in the newly built Waldstadion in 1925 . In 1928 the wholesale market hall was built at Frankfurt's Osthafen .

Shortly after taking office, Landmann founded an incorporation commission and carried out the legislative process for a considerable expansion of Frankfurt's territory. On April 1, 1928, the town of Höchst am Main and parts of the dissolved district of Höchst and the municipality of Fechenheim, which was formerly part of the district of Hanau, were incorporated with a total of around 80,000 inhabitants. This was the first time that Frankfurt's population exceeded 500,000. The urban area increased by around a third to 195 square kilometers. With the new city districts, the large chemical works Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur , Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron and Farbwerke Hoechst , which had belonged to IG Farbenindustrie since 1925 , came to the city area. The IG Farben building in Westend, completed in 1931 , was the largest administrative building in Europe at the time, a visible sign of the upswing that Frankfurt had experienced in the Landmann era.

In the Prussian and German Association of Cities , Landmann campaigned for a reform of the Weimar Constitution to improve the cities' financial situation. He strove to reorganize the German Empire according to economic regions instead of countries, as he had designed for the Rhine-Main area with the Rhein-Mainischen Städtkranz .

Appreciation

Today, Landmann is considered to be an important mayor of Frankfurt, who had both the visionary power of a long-term planning urban planner and the pragmatic sense for what is technically and economically feasible. During his tenure, the successes of his economic policy were recognized, but the costs of cultural policy in particular were also criticized. The Frankfurt Social Democrats also criticized the fact that Landmann organized the city's commercial enterprises privately, if possible in the legal form of a stock corporation , in order to remove them from the sphere of influence of local politics.

Landmann was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Heidelberg (1917) and Frankfurt (1928). The Ludwig-Landmann-Straße , where the settlements West Hausen and Praunheim are, a reminder of him. A portrait of the mayor by Wilhelm Runze , a Sossenheim painter, hangs in the foyer in front of the council chamber in Frankfurt's Römer town hall . Since 1987, the remains of Landmann and his wife have been buried in an honorary grave in Frankfurt's main cemetery. The tombstone is a copy of the grave in Voorburg (Netherlands), where Landmann was buried in 1945.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Carlos Martini : Music as a form of spiritual resistance. Jewish musicians 1933-1945. The example of Frankfurt . In: Karl E. Grözinger (Ed.): Jewish culture in Frankfurt am Main from the beginnings to the present . Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1997, p. 373-408, here p. 375 .
  2. ^ Hans Riebsamen: Signs of life from Amsterdam . Mirjam Pressler has written a documentary novel about Anne Frank and her family. He tells of the horror of the persecution, but also of hope to the end. In: FAZ . October 18, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Farmer, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Politician, Lord Mayor of Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 1945
Place of death Voorburg , Netherlands