Otto Brandt (political economist)

Lampertus Otto Brandt (born September 20, 1868 in Salzungen , † June 25, 1924 in Berlin ) was a German economist and from 1899 to 1921 managing director of the Düsseldorf Chamber of Commerce and Industry . Through diverse activities in Düsseldorf he played an outstanding role in the consolidation of the economy in Düsseldorf after the great economic boom in the last decades of the 19th century up to the onset of the First World War. From 1921 he was managing director of the German Industry and Trade Conference (DIHT) in Berlin.

Life

Brandt's father Christian was a tax advisor for the Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen in Saalfeld . Otto Brandt attended high school in Saalfeld with the Abitur in 1888, did his military service as a one-year volunteer and then studied economics, geography, natural sciences and law in Leipzig, Berlin and from 1894 in Jena, where he wrote a dissertation on the socio-economic thinking of 1895 Ferdinand Lassalle received his doctorate from Julius Pierstorff . He then briefly worked as an economics editor at Brockhaus Konversationslexikon and then until 1896 as a scientific assistant in the Halberstadt Chamber of Commerce. From 1896 to 1899 he was managing director of the Association of Trade and Industry Associations of the Grand Duchy and the Northwest German Canal Association in Oldenburg . He also wrote a memorandum for the expansion of the Hunte-Ems Canal . After applying unsuccessfully to Bielefeld, he became managing director of the Düsseldorf Chamber of Commerce in 1899. In 1905 he founded the monthly magazine of the Chamber of Commerce (from 1918 weekly, from 1920 business newspaper of the Düsseldorf Chamber of Commerce), in which he also published a lot. In 1919 he and other prominent Düsseldorfers were temporarily arrested as a hostage by the Spartacists , but released one day later because fears of an occupation by British troops were vanished. In 1904 he became a member of the Düsseldorf city council for the Liberal Association and in 1919 he was also city councilor for the DDP (the successor to the Liberal Association). In 1919, in the discussion about future economic policy, he spoke out against plans for a planned economy published by the Reich Ministry of Economics on May 7, but which quickly disappeared. Brandt gave a lecture on the 4th of July before the main committee of the German Industry and Trade Day, which was also published.

In 1921 he became a managing member of the presidential board of the German Industry and Commerce Congress (DIHT) in Berlin and from 1922 he was chairman of the Association of German Chamber of Commerce and Industry Secretaries. He then moved to Berlin in 1922. In his function as head of the DIHT he was also politically influential, for example in the reorganization of German foreign trade policy. From 1923 he was on the provisional Reich Economic Council . During Hermann Müller's brief chancellorship , he was offered the post of reconstruction minister in 1920, but he refused.

He was a versatile journalist in daily and business newspapers.

From 1908 to 1921 he was managing director of the Düsseldorf Stock Exchange, which had been state-recognized since 1884. In 1906 he became managing director of the Association of German Iron Foundries. He was instrumental in founding the city archive in Düsseldorf in 1912 and co-founded the Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsarchiv in Cologne in 1906 (after Brandt had tried in vain to bring the archive to Düsseldorf).

Brandt died after an operation in Berlin (he had cancer of the throat ).

He was married to Margarete Koch (1873–1961) since 1898. Her son Siegfried Brandt (1899–1943) was a lawyer in Berlin. His second son, Günther Brandt (1903–1984), who was also a national economist, was managing director of several leading associations in the German metal industry before the Second World War and, after the war, authorized signatory at Diehl in Nuremberg; he had a column in the magazine metal-economy-science-technology .

Fonts

• Ferdinand Lassalle's socio-economic views and practical suggestions, Jena: G. Fischer 1895, digitized version (= dissertation, University of Jena)
• The expansion of the Hunte-Ems Canal: memorandum of the Northwest German Canal Association, Oldenburg: Stalling 1898, digitized
• Studies on the economic and administrative history of the city of Düsseldorf in the 19th century, Düsseldorf, A. Bagel 1902
• On the history and appreciation of the world exhibitions. In: Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft, Volume 7, 1904, 7 pp. 81–96
• The Hansabund , its goals and opponents, Leipzig 1909
• Amerikabriefe, 1913 (reports from his trip to America, previously published in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung from 1912 to 1913)
• Editor with Otto Most: Local history and economics for Rhineland and Westphalia, 2 volumes, Essen, 1914
• Economic culture and German administration of the occupied territories in enemy territory, Baedeker Verlag Essen 1915
• Industry during the war 1914/15, trenches books for the German people 31, 1916
• Economic issues in the second year of the war: Lecture given at the 47th general meeting of the Association of German Iron Foundries in Düsseldorf on August 5, 1916
• Germany's trade policy after the war. A memorandum from the Düsseldorf Chamber of Commerce, 1918
• Forced syndicates and state monopolies, publications of the Association for the Promotion of German Economic Interests Abroad 2, Berlin-Zehlendorf-West, Kalkoff Verlag, 1918
• Planned economy according to the memorandum of the Reich Ministry of Economics of May 7, 1919, together with a declaration by the main committee, Berlin 1919
• The future customs and trade policy of Germany, reports to the foreign trade committee and the main committee of the German Industry and Trade Congress, Berlin: Liebheit & Thiesen 1923

In 1897 he published Friedrich List's work on a Saxon railway system as the basis of a general German railway system at Reclam .

literature

• Clemens Graf von Looz-Corswarem : Otto Brandt, in: Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsbiografien, Volume 15, Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung 1994, pp. 43–76

Web links

• Biography in the Federal Archives

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This is why LO Brandt (Lampertus Otto Brandt) is sometimes cited
2. ↑ In between there was also a downturn from 1907 to 1910.
3. ↑ Still confidential when published in 1918