Marc Somerhausen

Marc Somerhausen (born July 13, 1899 in Ixelles / Elsene ; † March 14, 1992 ibid) was a Belgian lawyer and politician of the Belgian Workers' Party .

Life

Somerhausen came from an old family of lawyers of Jewish origin, who had lived in Brussels for several generations , and he was the son of the lawyer Emile Somerhausen. His brother, the political scientist Luc Somerhausen (1903–1982) was a co-founder and one of two survivors of the Masonic lodge Liberté chérie, founded in 1943 in the Emsland camp , and his cousin Jacques Somerhausen (1905–1981) received in 1999 together with his wife Elisabeth, née Schwyter (1905– 1995) the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations for non-Jewish individuals who saved Jews from murder during the Second World War .

Marc Somerhausen grew up in the Brussels suburb of Ixelles and attended the German school there until 1914. During the First World War he served as a war volunteer in a Belgian artillery regiment. After the end of the war, Somerhausen first studied law at the Free University of Brussels , where he obtained his diploma, which, under Belgian law at the time and after four years of study, entitles him to obtain a PhD without a separate doctorate. jur. to be allowed to call. Somerhausen then completed a postgraduate course at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in the USA with the help of a foreign scholarship . There he met his future wife Anne von Stoffregen, whom he married on his return to Brussels and with whom he had three sons. He himself now established himself as a lawyer.

In addition to his work as a lawyer, Somerhausen, who had been open to socialist ideas since his youth, began a political career and joined the Belgian Workers' Party. For this he took part, among others, together with Louis de Brouckère and Émile Vandervelde , Belgium's Minister of Justice until 1921, as a delegate at the founding event of the Socialist Workers' International in Hamburg . Finally, as a socialist MP for the Verviers district, he won a seat in the Belgian Chamber of Deputies , initially for the legislative period from 1925 to 1929 and again for the years 1932 to 1936.

At the beginning of the Second World War , Somerhausen joined the Belgian Air Force as a volunteer again in 1940. A little later he became a German prisoner of war, from which he was only released in 1945 after the end of the war. During his imprisonment he had been denounced to the Secret State Police , which accused him of helping German Social Democrats, who went into hiding in 1933, to smuggle illegal propaganda material from Belgium to Germany. Somerhausen was interrogated but not subjected to any further prosecution.

After a brief service in the Berlin military mission, Somerhausen returned to Brussels and resumed his political work. In the chamber elections of 1946 he moved again, this time as a member of the Brussels electoral district, in the Belgian Chamber of Deputies and at the same time occupied a mandate in the city council of Ixelles. After Somerhausen was appointed as an advisor to the newly founded Belgian Council of State a year later , he resigned his mandate in the Chamber. In 1966 the State Council named him its President.

From 1954 until his retirement in 1969, Somerhausen held a position as associate professor for administrative law at the Free University of Brussels.

Act

Characterized by his German-speaking upbringing and school, Somerhausen made it his task at an early stage to stand up for the interests of German-speaking fellow citizens in Belgium. As early as 1923, when he had made contact with Karl Weiss, the founder of the local socialist movement, on behalf of his party in Eupen , he became familiar with the integration problems, especially of the "New Belgians" living there, following the First as a result of the Treaty of Versailles World War II had been taken over by the Belgian state through the incorporation of the former Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy . In the election campaign year 1925 Somerhausen had therefore also campaigned for a comprehensive right of self-determination for the former Germans and for a renewed referendum on the nationality of the formerly German areas. This earned him around a quarter of his votes from the German-speaking population, which was the first time he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.

Two years later, on March 15, 1927, Somerhausen, as a member of parliament, brought a much- noticed interpellation in the chamber, in which he called for a repetition of the referendum of 1920 on the integration of the former German territories, which many believed was manipulated and not free and had been independent. After the first signs of the incipient National Socialism in Germany showed in these years , he and his party moved away from his previous demands and instead advocated better integration while at the same time ensuring the greatest possible freedom for German-speaking compatriots.

Since the French language had become more and more prevalent in the course of time, especially in the southern and also German-influenced provinces of Belgium such as the Areler Land , Somerhausen founded the “Bund der.” In 1931 together with the Germanist Heinrich Bischoff and the pastor Frédéric Schaul German-Belgians ”in the Luxembourg municipality of Tüntingen . This saw itself as the successor organization of the "Association for the maintenance and uplifting of the German mother tongue in German-speaking Belgium" of the historian Godefroid Kurth , which was dissolved in the First World War, and had the goal of reviving the German language and re-establishing it as the main language in school lessons. However, since the population in these communities was now firmly established in their Belgian-national attitude and was also deterred in a certain way by the incipient nationalist currents in Germany, the newly founded federation met with increasing unacceptance as early as 1933 and later became meaningless. Now that the vast majority of the democratically-minded “New Belgians” had established that a return to Germany was no longer possible, Somerhausen became increasingly committed to the rights of German-speaking compatriots in the Belgian state association, for example in the judiciary, and for broad bilingualism in the entire area of the former German communities. Somerhausen maintained this attitude and his commitment for a lifetime.

In 2013 the Kgl. History and museum association “Between Venn and Schneifel” in St. Vith Marc Somerhausen with a comprehensive exhibition that had already been shown a year earlier in the BRF radio station in Brussels.

literature

• Paul Van Molle: Het Belgisch Parlement, 1894–1972 , Antwerp, 1972
• Heinz Warny: Marc Somerhausen - fought early for Eupen-Malmedy . In: Lebensbilder from Ostbelgien , Volume 1, Grenz-Echo-Verlag, Eupen 2017, pp. 164–165 ISBN 978-3-86712-131-6
• Heinz Warny: Belgium's rediscovered brothers - Eupen-Malmedy 1920 to 1940 in the Brussels Parliament . Grenz-Echo Verlag, Eupen 2012. S 160-262 ISBN 978-3-86712-070-8

Web links

• Short biography on odis.be
• Marc Somerhausen , biography on the website of the Center for East Belgian History

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 80 years ago, Marc Somerhausen forced the Chamber's first major Eupen-Malmedy debate , in: Grenz-Echo of September 27, 2007
2. ^ The referendum of 1920 in the focus of the EGMV , Grenz-Echo of December 9, 1998
3. ↑ Dr. Marc Somerhausen - committed fighter for the self-determination of the new Belgians in the interwar period. , Press release of the Kgl. History and museum association “Between Venn and Schneifel” from April 24, 2013