Otto Brown

This article is about SPD politician Otto Braun, other meanings under Otto Braun (disambiguation) .

Otto Braun, July 1930

Otto Braun (born January 28, 1872 in Königsberg i. Pr .; died December 15, 1955 in Locarno , Switzerland , according to other sources in Ascona ) was a German social democratic politician in the Weimar Republic .

From 1920 to 1932, with two brief interruptions (March–November 1921 and February–April 1925), he was Prime Minister of the Free State of Prussia . This personal continuity resulted in largely stable government conditions in Prussia, in contrast to imperial politics. Braun tried to build Prussia into a "republican bulwark" in the Weimar Republic. During his term of office, among other things, the reorganization of public administration from a democratic point of view falls.

Occasionally dubbed the “Red Czar of Prussia”, Braun was both a committed social democrat and a Prussian. He pursued a hands-on, resolute reform policy that was controversial but always within the bounds of legality . The limits of this approach were demonstrated to him at the end of the Weimar Republic. With the so-called “ Prussian Strike ” on July 20, 1932, the Braun government was overthrown by Chancellor Franz von Papen after it had previously lost the election to a majority of National Socialists and Communists, who voted them out but did not agree on a successor government , so that all ministers remained in office. Despite the new power-political realities, Braun tried to counteract the illegal action with legal measures, which remained ineffective and meaningless, despite a case he had won in the Reichsgericht .

With Hitler's seizure of power , Braun's reform policy was quickly and thoroughly revised and Braun had to flee into exile.

Life

Braun was the son of a craftsman who suffered social decline in his life from being a self-employed master shoemaker to being a railway attendant . Otto Braun himself completed an apprenticeship as a printer after a short period of schooling . He was an impressive person: almost 1.90 meters tall, broad build, strong willed, with a pronounced organizational talent and an ability to lead even complicated groups. Only as a speaker and actor was he far inferior to his opponents and party friends in the Weimar Republic. Braun, who thought and acted objectively and soberly, lacked both the rhetorical skills and the ability to enthrall his listeners with an emotional speech. Despite all the pragmatism of his politics, he was always guided by his deep humanistic conviction of people's right to freedom and political equality.

Little information has survived about his wife Emilie, née Podzius, who was a year older than him. He met her in the 1890s at a party convention where he was a speaker. During Braun's time as Prime Minister, Emilie never appeared in public. She was taciturn among her close friends and acquaintances and seemed withdrawn. Nevertheless, she seems to have been very energetic and self-confident, because she was supposedly able to put Braun in his place at home, who was not exactly weak-willed. Emilie was friends with Käthe Kollwitz . On April 3, 1894, Emilie and Otto were married in front of the district court in Königsberg. Since Emilie became terminally ill in 1927, the couple's life was largely confined to the home from the 1920s onwards. According to eyewitness reports, Braun devotedly cared for his wife, and his flight to Switzerland in 1933 appears to have been mainly due to concern for Emilie. His only child, Erich, died of diphtheria in 1915 at the age of 21 as a volunteer in World War I – a loss that deeply affected Braun.

Königsberg around 1895, castle tower and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse

Braun loved the nature of East Prussia. In the SPD's New World calendar of 1911 he wrote about East Prussia:

"The heart of the superficial observer rises when he wanders on a bright summer day through the north-eastern plains of our fatherland. He strides past lush, colorful meadows where the buzzing of the bees reveals busy activity. … Freed from all social shackles, feeling one with the beautiful nature that surrounds him, he throws himself in the shade of a tree at the edge of the forest.”

Later, as Prussian minister and prime minister, who was entrusted with state property, among other things, he liked to go hunting often – which brought him some personal attacks. He was accused from the right that he did not hunt like a hunter and from the left that he cultivated such an aristocratic hobby.

Braun was involved in social democracy early on . There, influenced by anarcho-syndicalism , he initially belonged to the left wing. At the age of twenty he published a newspaper mostly single-handedly and was the outstanding organizational figure of the SPD in East Prussia during this time. He spent most of his life as a professional politician, first as a member of parliament , later as a minister and finally as prime minister. After the Nazis seized power , Braun fled to Switzerland on March 4, 1933, where he wrote his volume of memoirs From Weimar to Hitler in 1940 . Even after the end of the Second World War he remained in exile in Switzerland until the end of his life. Although he still attended the federal party conferences of the SPD, he otherwise stayed away from political life. Although outwardly he was often described as hard and matter-of-fact or as a Prussian iceberg , close friends and acquaintances considered him very sentimental and guided by deep humanistic basic convictions.

During the Weimar Republic , Braun belonged to the Republic Protection Organization Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold .

In the SPD

The main features of Braun's career were typical of many functionaries of the SPD in the Weimar Republic. At the age of 16, Braun was already illegally involved in the SPD, which was banned under the Socialist Law. He became chairman of the Königsberg workers' electoral association and later producer, editor and printer of changing social democratic magazines. In an area where several attempts by the SPD to establish a party newspaper had failed, Braun founded a successful paper, the Königsberger Volkszeitung , without any seed capital, with minimal support from the party leadership and under seemingly adventurous distribution conditions in a rural area dominated by large-scale agriculture .

During this time he was particularly involved with the farm workers in East Prussia and thus developed into an expert on agricultural policy in the party and a lifelong opponent of the east Elbian land squires. In his later writing Das ostelbische Landproletariat he wrote in his unwieldy prose:

"The exploited, disenfranchised East Elbian rural population is the pedestal on which the power of the East Elbian Junkers rests for the most part and on which it drives its starving and disenfranchising robbery policy. However, this base must become more rotten to the extent that it succeeds in spreading the social-democratic principles among the population groups that form it.”

Otto Braun suggested the founding of the German Agricultural Workers' Association . He was chairman of the local health insurance fund and a member of the city council of Königsberg.

In 1892, Braun received a two-month sentence for lese majeste . In November 1903 Braun was arrested and in 1904 proceedings were instituted against him and eight other Social Democrats for high treason . The prosecutors accused him of importing into Russia anarchist writings calling for the overthrow of the tsar . Braun spent over five months in custody . In the Königsberg secret society trial , Braun was defended by Hugo Haase , who uncovered the cooperation between the Prussian police and the Russian secret service Ochrana . The evidence was deemed unfounded by the court and Braun was acquitted. On the other hand, high treason against foreign monarchs was only punishable in Germany at that time if a reciprocal agreement had been concluded with the country in question. This was not the case with Russia.

In 1898 he became chairman of the SPD in East Prussia, and in 1905 he took on his first party office at national level as a member of the Control Commission. In 1911, Braun was promoted to the Reich Executive Committee of the SPD as chief treasurer, of which he was a member until 1917. In 1913 he got a seat in the Prussian House of Representatives . Although initially belonging to the left wing of the party, the autodidacts were worlds apart from the later highly educated Spartacists and communists . He found their arguments too unworldly, too theoretical and too little aligned with achievable and practical goals. As early as 1895 he commented on the discussions about an agricultural program in the party:

“The draft offers nothing for practical agitation. As in the whole debate, there were arguments about doctoral questions.”

After the party's rejection of the draft:

"So let's leave our program, which has already helped us over many mountains and led to many victories, completely untouched for the time being, and if we don't quack around with it so often, it can't lead to a good result. But different with our tactics, which of course have to be adapted to the respective conditions at all locations due to our program.”

He criticized Rosa Luxemburg for her “obnoxious schoolmasterly manner”.

During World War I he remained on the side of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) and supported the party's so-called Burgfriedenspolitik . This should prevent domestic political conflicts in Germany during the war. In 1917 he helped organize the January strike , and in 1918 he became a member of the Workers' and Soldiers' Council in Berlin for the MSPD . Braun, who valued reliability and organizational efficiency, was not happy on the council. This was often governed by changing majorities, the composition of the members was highly dependent on chance, and the discussions often did not revolve around practical questions but got lost in fundamental ideological debates. From this time he retained a lifelong aversion to "the council system".

Reichstag building (about 1894 to 1900)

In 1919/1920 Braun was a member of the Weimar National Assembly . From 1920 to 1933 he was a member of the German Reichstag . Due to the conflicts of interest between Reich and Prussia and due to Braun's often hands-on and unconventional manner, there was an estrangement between him and the SPD party leadership in the Weimar Republic. While Braun, as a pragmatist, focused his actions primarily on the interests of the SPD/DDP/Centre coalition in Prussia and thus the stability of the government, the party and parliamentary group leadership in the Reichstag naturally put the SPD’s own interests first. Especially after reunification with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), there were often conflicts about the political course. Personal rivalries, especially between the two leaders Braun and Otto Wels , further worsened the climate of communication. Braun accused the SPD leadership of acting irresponsibly, which attested to Braun's ruthless behavior towards the party and a lack of respect for social democratic principles.

The break came emotionally when Braun inaugurated the restored Neue Wache in Berlin as a memorial to the First World War at the end of the 1920s. The political right refused to honor the memorial to a "traitor to the fatherland". Braun, who was personally affected by his fallen son, was also deeply affected by the unanimous rejection of the political left and the social democrats. A memory that was extraordinarily important to him personally received little more than ridicule and derision from his comrades.

in the Prussian government

Otto Braun as a member of the Weimar National Assembly , 1919

Braun was already a member of the Prussian House of Representatives during the German Empire . In 1918 he became Minister of Agriculture under Paul Hirsch . Braun was against the destruction of the state of Prussia, which he perceived as Germany's democratic cell of order . He also feared that the dissolution of Prussia, which covered about 2/3 of the German Reich in terms of area but was very inhomogeneously composed, would strengthen the victorious powers ' demands for annexation . As Minister of Agriculture, he attempted an agrarian reform that was primarily intended to disempower the powerful landowners east of the Elbe. At the heart of his ideas was a settlement policy designed to settle former soldiers on fallow land: the soldiers themselves would have found civilian employment; at the same time, the tense food situation in the Reich would have improved. Bitter resistance from the big farmers, Hirsch's hesitant attitude and the legal situation that contradicted Braun's plans largely caused the plans to fail.

When the Allied demands for the Versailles Treaty became known on May 7, 1919, the outrage of the public and the political leadership knew no bounds. On May 21, 1919 Otto Braun said in Lyck :

"Never in the history of the world has such a shameless deception been perpetrated on a people as here. ... The Prussian state government and the Reich government, in agreement with all the representatives of the people, have taken the position that this treaty is designed to lead the German people into permanent slavery and that it is therefore completely unacceptable to us and will not be signed may."

– Otto Brown

prime minister

Braun was Prime Minister of Prussia from March 1920 to March 1921, from November 1921 to January 1925 and from April 1925 to May 1932. Ironically, he only became prime minister because his opponents considered him more dangerous as agriculture minister and they influenced the other coalition parties accordingly. He was the most powerful man in by far the largest and most populous state of the Weimar Republic. Apart from brief interruptions due to the unstable political situation in the republic, he held this office for twelve years until the Prussian offensive in 1932.

Among the numerous issues Braun had to deal with were disputes with the large landowners and their allied German National People's Party (DNVP), tensions with Poland as well as with the Polish minority in Prussia over border and minority issues , Ruhr occupation and Ruhrkampf . His office was made more difficult by a conflict with the mayor of Cologne , Konrad Adenauer , the chairman of the Prussian provincial representation, about the status of the Rhineland in the Prussian state. Added to this was the small war with the Hohenzollern family over their family or Prussian state property, which led to the referendum on the expropriation of the princes in 1926. Within the coalition, the Center Party was the critical partner – for most of the time, it could have formed a so-called right-wing coalition together with the DNVP and the German People's Party (DVP), as it repeatedly did at Reich level.

"Democratic Bulwark" Prussia

During this period, Braun pursued an ambitious policy in the midst of a political field fraught with tension. Braun's greatest advantage over Reich politics were the election results - the Weimar coalition always retained a narrow majority in the state parliament - and the Prussian constitution: the prime minister was elected by the state parliament, so unlike the chancellor he could at least usually count on a majority in the state parliament leave parliament . Ernst Heilmann (SPD) and Joseph Hess (Centre) made a significant contribution to the cohesion of the government factions .

Braun's most important allies were the country's two Social Democratic interior ministers, Carl Severing and Albert Grzesinski . The coalition he led consisted of the parties of the Weimar coalition , until 1924 with the involvement of the DVP . The main points of conflict were school policy on the one hand and the arguments about who to fill official positions on the other . While the center party favored denominational schools linked to the church, the SPD and the German Democratic Party (DDP) opted for religiously independent state schools. There were differences in the composition of the civil service as to whether this should be done primarily from a political-democratic point of view or primarily from the point of view of professional competence, which, due to the recruitment of junior civil servants, resulted in a large preponderance of conservative civil servants who opposed the Republic until 1919. Finally, the coalition partners just as often criticized the agricultural policy, which appeared to them to be “full of socialist experiments”.

Due to his authoritarian style of government, Braun was referred to as the Tsar of Prussia , and Prussia itself was considered a democratic bulwark under his government . The governments changed much less frequently than in the Reich. With Braun, a single politician remained in power almost the entire time.

reform policy

During Braun's tenure, a land reform and a democratic reform of the school system were partially successful. One of the most important goals of the Braun government was to fill the civil service and especially the police force with democrats. In particular, after the Kapp putsch , unlike in other countries, the government consistently took disciplinary action against disloyal officials. Interior Minister Grzesinski summarized the program when he took office in 1926:

• Fight against the enemies of the republic.
• Consolidation of state power, in particular through the expansion of the police executive.
• Elimination of the reactionary leading civil servants in the state administration and their replacement by convinced supporters of the Weimar Constitution, also from broad sections of the population.
• Elimination of the still existing Junk privileges in Prussia by abolishing the estate districts .
• Initiation and implementation of state and municipal administrative reform.

Braun and Prussia's Minister of the Interior, Carl Severing , replaced almost all of the senior presidents, district presidents, district administrators and police chiefs. After its reorganization by Wilhelm Abegg , the Prussian police in particular was considered one of the most important guarantors of the Weimar Republic. In the end it was about 50,000 strong, mostly Republican-minded and partly paramilitary trained. Even during the street fights that became frequent in the late 1920s and early 1930s, she knew how to assert herself.

However, since there were hardly any supporters of democracy who already had civil service training or even longer experience in office, the reshuffle could only be partially carried out. Especially below the direct management level, the government had to keep many officials loyal to the emperor in office. Conservative and bourgeois parties in particular vehemently rejected any new political positions, although both the DDP and the DVP were awarded an above-average number of positions in the governing bodies of the administration. The re-integration of the DVP into the Prussian government failed several times, mainly because of this question.

1925 presidential election

In the 1925 presidential election, Braun ran for the successor to Friedrich Ebert in the office of president against the center politician Wilhelm Marx , Karl Jarres from the DVP and Ernst Thälmann from the KPD. The Social Democrats relied on a leading figure known throughout the Reich who was not dissimilar in mentality to Ebert. In the first ballot, he received 29 percent of the votes, a much better result than the SPD result in the last Reichstag election. Because the center refused to support a social democratic candidate in the second ballot, Braun withdrew in favor of Marx. However, since Marx was just as unsuccessful as Braun in addressing the right-wing conservative spectrum, he lost to Paul von Hindenburg .

End of the Weimar Republic

Braun initially had a good relationship with the new President Hindenburg, surprising both observers and the two of them. The prime minister, who was a hand's breadth taller than the tall field marshal, was also symbolically one of the few men who met Hindenburg on an equal footing. He was neither caught up in the old system in order not to see the “politically completely naïve” (Braun) people alongside the revered heroes and celebrated World War veterans, nor did he suffer from the complex of social climbers that was widespread in the social democracy of the time compared to the old power elites. They found a common ground for conversation in their mutual passion for hunting in East Prussia. Hindenburg experienced Braun as a politician who thought less in terms of ideological subtleties, but rather, within certain basic convictions, was above all openly and pragmatically oriented towards day-to-day politics. Hindenburg stated after their first meeting:

"My friends in Hanover had told me that Otto Braun was a fanatical agitator. Now I see that he is quite a reasonable person, with whom you can talk about anything.”

In the long term, however, Braun was unable to assert himself against the President's environment. At the latest after the Rhenish steel helmet was banned in October 1929 - Hindenburg was an honorary member of the association and took the ban personally - the trust between them was destroyed; the President was ready to politically support the Prussian strike.

In the final phase of the Weimar Republic, Braun tried to take offensive action against the National Socialists . In addition to the ban on the Rhenish steel helmet , together with the Prussian police and the interior ministers Carl Severing and Albert Grzesinski, he pushed through the Reich-wide ban on the SA . The state security worked comparatively goal-oriented and successfully against the NSDAP, but both its powers and its possibilities were limited. After the failure of the grand coalition in the Reich, the SPD largely supported the Brüning government in the Reichstag , mainly to ensure that the center in Prussia continued to support Braun and so that the Prussian police remained under the authority of democrats.

However, Braun's majority slowly dwindled, especially since the opponents of the Weimar Republic were at least able to decide to cooperate against the government. In 1930, the DNVP and the KPD submitted a motion of no confidence in parliament. In 1931, the Stahlhelm , with the support of the NSDAP , DNVP, DVP and KPD, tried to push through a referendum to overthrow the government in Prussia.

deposition

The Reichsgericht building in Leipzig

Otto Braun (left) with Rudolf Breitscheid , 1932

In the elections on April 24, 1932, the Weimar coalition failed to gain a majority in the Prussian state elections for the first time. However, since it was not possible to form a government with a parliamentary majority, Braun and his cabinet remained in office in accordance with Article 59 of the state constitution after they had formally submitted their resignation in their entirety. Braun himself suffered a physical collapse after the strenuous election campaign on the night of April 22-23. When it became apparent that the government would remain in office, Braun handed over the current official business to the central politician Heinrich Hirtsiefer and moved into his sickbed in Berlin-Zehlendorf . On the morning of July 20, 1932, a ministry official brought him the letter of dismissal from Chancellor Franz von Papen . Braun responded to the so-called " Prussian Strike " by attempting to advance to Papen. Allegedly, however, his company car had already been confiscated. Braun stayed in Zehlendorf and prepared a lawsuit on behalf of the Prussian state government at the state court of the Reich court .

Both the poor election result and Braun's poor health came in handy for Papen in order to eliminate the most important power center of the Republican parties. The pretext was the so-called " Altona Bloody Sunday ", which allowed the Reich execution to be presented as a necessary step to restore peace and order. Although Braun officially remained Prime Minister, his powers were transferred to Papen as Reich Commissioner ( see: Reichskommissariat Papen I ).

The State Court of Justice on July 25 refused to issue an injunction against Hindenburg 's emergency decree concerning the restoration of public safety and order in the territory of the Land of Prussia . Braun then spent the summer on vacation in Bad Gastein , Austria , and Ascona , Switzerland . Braun was back in Berlin from mid-October. On October 25, the State Court of Justice ruled in the Prussia versus Reich case that Papen's and Hindenburg's measures were not lawful, but that the result had to be tolerated. The Braun government continues to retain the constitutional rights vis-à-vis the Landtag, Reichsrat and Reich government and their ministerial salaries ( RGZ 138, appendix p. 1-43). Talks with Papen and Hindenburg on October 29 brought no progress. Legally, Braun was still Prime Minister of Prussia, but his only power lay in presiding over meaningless meetings of the sovereign government and representing Prussia in the Reichsrat, while Reich Commissioner Papen rushed to revise the reforms of the last twelve years. The appointment of Kurt von Schleicher as Reich Commissioner brought no significant differences. This was to change only after Hitler seized power. With the help of Papen, Hermann Göring secured a new emergency decree from Paul von Hindenburg, which also officially deposed the meaningless sovereign government. Braun's actions were again limited to filing a complaint with the state court on February 7, 1933.

It was only the events following the Reichstag fire and warnings that his life was in danger that prompted Braun to flee. On March 4, 1933, he drove across the border to Austria . The SPD party leadership did not forgive him for this flight, which became known before the polling stations closed for the March 5 state and Reichstag elections . It seemed to them like a desertion, with perhaps disastrous repercussions for the outcome of the election and a demoralizing effect on the defenders of the republic. There was practically no contact between Braun and the party leadership in exile, the Sopade .

In retrospect, Braun himself was often accused of having surrendered without a fight and not having called a general strike , for example, or having tried to regain his powers with the help of the 50,000-strong Prussian police force at the time. In retrospect, Braun's behavior during the Prussian attack symbolized the helplessness of the democratic forces in the face of an enemy who felt neither bound by order nor the applicable law. However, in view of the political and military balance of power in 1932, he himself considered a more active approach to be futile. In his opinion it would have provoked unnecessary bloodshed; Braun surrendered to the end of the republic with an essentially unsuccessful lawsuit before the state court.

In exile

After Braun had been warned of a wave of arrests by those close to the President of the Reich, he fled to Ascona in Switzerland, which he already knew as a holiday resort. In Switzerland, he was forbidden from any political activity, as was gainful employment. Although Braun was able to save most of his fortune, he spent it on a piece of land with a house and even took out mortgages on it, confident that he would get his pension paid out as Prussian Prime Minister. After it became clear that he would have to get by with almost no money, Braun withdrew into gardening and thus into the nature he loved, suffering from depression. In a letter he wrote that he brooded over the "whole misery of my miserable existence" and he asked himself: "As a 62-year-old, worked-out man, whose freedom of movement is still severely restricted by my paralyzed wife, how am I supposed to take it under myself?" create a new existence in today's conditions.” The Gestapo found it incredible that the Red Czar was content with growing potatoes in exile, but she herself found no convincing evidence to the contrary.

In the summer of 1937, Braun fled to Paris when a lawyer tried to collect a five hundred mark debt through Switzerland. Braun unsuccessfully tried to rent or sell his home; he finally left Switzerland for fear of the bailiff. In Paris he had closer contact with the SPD again for the first time, but what was particularly noticeable was that he was under a constant manic compulsion to justify himself. His friends were able to persuade him to write his memoirs. Braun buried himself in the files, and by 1938 the manuscript of From Weimar to Hitler was complete. At the end of 1939 his political testament was published, severely abridged because of Swiss army censorship .

He was also now able to rent out his house in Ascona at a good price, so that he could move back to Switzerland and live there – at least without the worst financial worries – until the outbreak of war. Then it went down again; there were no more tenants, so Braun had to move back into his house with no income. The income from his book didn't even cover the mortgage interest on his house. In the summer of 1941, Braun sold his watch and "other unnecessary things that can be turned into money". He spent much of the time in bed suffering from rheumatic attacks. He wrote to his closest confidant , Herbert Weichmann , "when I wander from free table to free table like a begging student for a few weeks, I can hardly resist a depressing feeling".

Only the former member of the Reichstag , Heinrich Georg Ritzel , brought Braun back into social life. He established contact with the Bavarian Social Democrat Wilhelm Hoegner and the former Chancellor Joseph Wirth . Together they drafted plans for a possible post-war order and tried to bring them closer to the Allies. Ritzel brokered modest financial support from the Schweizerisches Arbeiterhilfswerk , so at least Braun no longer had to beg.

aftermath

Although he had been one of the most powerful men of the Weimar Republic, Braun largely disappeared from public memory after World War II. His ideas about a post-war policy could not prevail. Neither his political views nor what he symbolized fitted into the changed situation in Germany. The old Free State of Prussia was now divided among the four states of the Federal Republic of Germany , the German Democratic Republic , Poland and the Soviet Union . During the Cold War , the idea of ​​a genuinely democratic and republican socialism increasingly contradicted both Western and Eastern political concepts. In the SBZ and later in the GDR, both as a social democrat and as a Prussian, he was much too close to the so-called revanchism to be appreciated. For many years, Konrad Adenauer , a staunch opponent of Prussianism and socialism, as well as Braun's domestic political opponent, dominated for many years in the Federal Republic . In addition, Braun's commitment to the republic for many years was eclipsed by his ultimate failure and his extensive passivity during the Prussian strike.

It was not until the 1970s that historians began to take an interest in Otto Braun again. Hagen Schulze recalled Braun with a comprehensive biography.

honors

Memorial stone for Otto Braun in Berlin-Zehlendorf

Monument at Otto-Braun-Platz in Potsdam

In the Sonnenhof district of Pforzheim , there has been an Otto-Braun-Straße since the district was created in 1968/1970 .

On January 30, 1980, the Berlin State Library named a large assembly hall in its building 2 on Potsdamer Strasse after Otto Braun. There is a bronze bust of Braun created by Hermann Brachert .

On June 30, 1987, a memorial stone was erected at the corner of Gilgestrasse and Potsdamer Chaussee in Berlin-Zehlendorf , not far from Otto Braun's former home (today Gilgestrasse 3).

A street in Berlin was named after Otto Braun on November 1, 1995. Otto-Braun-Strasse previously bore the name of Hans Beimlers . Efforts to name the square in front of the Berlin House of Representatives after Otto Braun came to nothing after the 1995 House of Representatives elections . In Potsdam, on March 19, 2013, the square between the Stadtschloss and Alterfahrt was named Otto-Braun-Platz , on which a bust of Otto Braun was unveiled on November 10, 2015.

writings

• Otto Braun: From Weimar to Hitler . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1940 (actually published in autumn 1939; Braun received 857 francs as the only payment in 1941).

Braun's personal estate is on the one hand with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and on the other hand in the hands of the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.

literature

• Otto Braun the Prussia chief . In: OB Server: Matadors of Politics; Universitas Deutsche Verlags-Aktiengesellschaft, Berlin, 1932; p. 46 ff.

• Manfred Beer: Otto Braun as Prussian Prime Minister. dissertation . University of Würzburg, 1970.
• Werner Blumenberg : Otto Braun. In: Fighters for Freedom. JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin/ Hanover 1959, pp. 125-133.
• Gordon A. Craig : Prussianism and Democracy. Otto Braun and Konrad Adenauer. Steine, Stuttgart 1986.
• Robert Volz: Reich Handbook of German Society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 1: A-K. German business publisher, Berlin 1930, DNB 453960286 .
• Manfred Görtemaker (ed.): Otto Braun. A Prussian democrat. be.bra Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-89809-116-9 .
• Albert Grzesinski : In the struggle for the German Republic. Memoirs of a Social Democrat. Edited by Eberhard Kolb , Oldenbourg-Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-56591-5 .
• Dieter Hertz-Eichenrode : Politics and agriculture in East Prussia 1919-1930. West German publishing house, Cologne 1969.
• Erich Kuttner: Otto Braun. popular edition. Volksfunk-Verlag, Berlin 1932.
• Peter Leßmann: The Prussian security police in the Weimar Republic. patrol duty and street fighting. Droste, Düsseldorf 1989, ISBN 3-7700-0794-8 .
• Cecile Lowenthal-Hensel : Otto Braun, 1872-1955. Exhibition of the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage; December 11, 1984 to January 31, 1985 . Berlin 1985.
• Wilhelm Matull: Prussian Prime Minister of the Weimar period. Commemorative speeches on the occasion of his 100th birthday on March 4, 1972. Publications of the East German Research Center in North Rhine-Westphalia, Dortmund 1973.
• Hagen Schulze : Review of Weimar. An exchange of letters between Otto Braun and Joseph Wirth in exile. In: Quarterly magazines for contemporary history . 26, 1, 1978, pp. 144-185. ISSN  0042-5702 .
• Hagen Schulze: Otto Braun or Prussia's democratic mission. A biography. Propyläen, Frankfurt am Main 1977. (also: Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-550-07355-0 ).
• Martin Schumacher (ed.): MdR The Reichstag deputies of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political Persecution, Emigration and Expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentary . 3rd, significantly expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
• Jürgen Manthey : Königsberg's social-democratic program (Otto Braun and Hugo Haase) , in the ed.: Königsberg. History of a World Citizen Republic . Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-423-34318-3 , pp. 542–553.

web links

Commons : Otto Braun  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Otto Braun in the German National Library catalogue
• Newspaper article about Otto Braun in the 20th Century Press Kit of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Kai-Britt Albrecht, Gabriel Eikenberg: Otto Braun. Tabular curriculum vitae in LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
• Otto Braun in the database of the Reichstag deputies
• Otto Braun in the online version of the Edition Files of the Reich Chancellery. Weimar Republic
• Video of Braun's reaction to the coup in Prussia
• Inventory of the Braun estate at the International Institute for Social History
• Appreciation of Otto Braun from the Berlin State Library, Bibliotheksmagazin 1/2006, pp. 28–31 (PDF; 879 kB).

itemizations

1. ↑ Kurt Eisner : The Tsar's Secret Society. Berlin 1904 (new edition Berlin 1988). According to Ernst A. Seils: Hugo Haase (2016), pp. 212–225.
2. ↑ Golo Mann : German history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries , S. Fischer-Verlag, 1958.
3. ↑ Klaus von der Groeben : The country of East Prussia. Self-preservation, self-design, self-government 1750 to 1945 . (= Sources on administrative history. No. 7). Lorenz von Stein Institute for Administrative Sciences at the Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel 1993.
4. ↑ Heinrich August Winkler : Disputes in German history: Essays on the 19th and 20th centuries. CH Beck, 1997, ISBN 3-406-42784-7 , p. 82 (online)
5. ↑ Decree of the Reich President concerning the restoration of public security and order in the territory of the State of Prussia (1932). In: constitutions.de. Retrieved September 13, 2020 . 
6. ↑ Three East Prussians – and the bust in front of the hall / On the 50th anniversary of his death: the State Library and Otto Braun (PDF; 900 kB). In: Library Magazine / Communications from the Berlin State Library. Issue 1/2006, pp. 28–31.
7. ↑ Commemoration of Otto Braun / 50th anniversary of the death of the last Prussian Prime Minister. ( Memento from February 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Der Zehlendorfer. No. 9, December 2005.
8. ↑ Kathrin Chod, Herbert Schwenk, Hainer Weisspflug: Otto-Braun-Strasse . In: Hans-Jürgen Mende , Kurt Wernicke (ed.): Berlin district encyclopedia, center . Luisenstadt educational association . tape 2 : N to Z . Haude and Spener / Edition Luisenstadt, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89542-111-1 ( luise-berlin.de – as of October 7, 2009).
9. ↑ Christine Richter : SPD wants Otto-Braun-Platz in front of the House of Representatives. In: Berliner Zeitung . 3 August 1995, retrieved 11 July 2012 . 
10. ↑ Festive inauguration of Otto-Braun-Platz. Press release from the city of Potsdam; see also Erardo C. Rautenberg: Why isn't Otto Braun as important to us as Old Fritz? In: Potsdam Latest News . April 23, 2012.
11. ↑ New puzzle pieces for the middle. In: Potsdamer Latest News. November 11, 2015.

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on June 28, 2004 in this version .