Oskar Cohn

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Oskar Cohn

Oskar Cohn (born October 15, 1869 in Guttentag , Lublinitz district ; died October 31, 1934 in Geneva ) was a German politician ( SPD , USPD ).

Life and work

After graduating from high school in Brieg in 1887, Cohn, who was of Jewish faith, studied law in Berlin , Greifswald and Munich . He received his doctorate in law in 1892 and had practiced as a lawyer in Berlin since 1897 . From 1899 he worked in a law firm with Karl Liebknecht and his brother Theodor Liebknecht . From 1909 Cohn was a part-time lecturer at the Berlin workers' training school. In the First World War he served as a non-commissioned officer from 1915 to 1917 . Cohn had been a staunch Zionist since the mid-twenties and campaigned for the creation of a Jewish state on a socialist basis in Palestine . In 1926 he represented Poale Zion , a left-wing Zionist organization, in the representative assembly of the Berlin Jewish community and in the representative body of the Jews in Prussia . After the takeover of the Nazis , he fled in 1933 to Paris to emigrate from there to Palestine. Before he could get a visa, however, he died in Geneva in October 1934, where he was attending the session of the World Jewish Congress . He was buried in Degania on the Sea of ​​Galilee in the oldest kibbutz in today's Israel .

Political party

Originally, Cohn belonged to the SPD. When the social democracy split as a result of differing views on the attitude of the SPD to the First World War, he joined the newly founded USPD. When the USPD majority united with the KPD to form the VKPD in 1920 , he stayed with the minority, which initially remained independent, but returned to the SPD in 1922.

MP

Cohn had been a city councilor in Berlin since 1907 . From 1912 to 1918 he was a member of the Reichstag for the constituency of Erfurt 1 ( Nordhausen ). In 1919/20 he was a member of the Weimar National Assembly . In the deliberations of the National Assembly, he called for the Jews to be included in the Weimar Constitution as a national minority . In the second reading of the Weimar Constitution on July 2, 1919, he spoke out in the National Assembly for naming the German state of the German Republic instead of the German Reich , because this was the only way to make the break with the outdated earlier order clear. In addition, the word “empire” is translated as “empire” in French and English, which has a fatal echo of imperialism. Sticking to the old designation should create the impression abroad that Germany is still striving for imperialist power. He also called for the formation of a unitary instead of a federal state . A unified state structure without independent member states can work much more efficiently, and the member states are only a relic of the old monarchist times.

Due to his origins in eastern Silesia , he always saw himself in the Reichstag and the National Assembly as a representative and advocate of Eastern Jewry . There was a scandal in the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the question of guilt in the World War of the First Reichstag when the DNVP politician Karl Helfferich repeatedly refused to answer Cohn's questions, referring to Cohn's Judaism.

From 1919 to 1924, Cohn was also a member of the state parliament in Prussia .

Public offices

During the rule of the Council of People's Representatives after the November Revolution, Cohn was Undersecretary of State in the Reich Justice Office .

literature

  • Oskar Cohn . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism. Deceased personalities . Vol. 1. JHW Dietz Nachf., Hanover 1960, p. 55.
  • Ludger Heid : Oskar Cohn. A socialist and Zionist in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3593370409 .
  • Ludger Heid: "Knowledge is power - power is knowledge". Oskar Cohn and the Berlin workers' training school. In: IWK . International academic correspondence on the history of the German labor movement 49 (2004), issue 1, pp. 22-55 (with a copy of the script of a lecture on the constitution).
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
  • Cohn, Oskar , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1972, Volume 5, Col. 692

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Imperial Statistical Office (Ed.): The Reichstag elections of 1912 . Booklet 2. Berlin: Verlag von Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht, 1913, p. 89 (Statistics of the German Reich, vol. 250)
personal data
SURNAME Cohn, Oskar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, USPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Good day , Lublinitz district
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1934
Place of death Geneva