Otto Sidow

Otto Sidow as a young cigar maker

Otto Sidow

Friedrich Wilhelm Leopold Otto Sidow (born May 1, 1857 in Friesack , Westhavelland district , † September 6, 1927 in Brandenburg an der Havel ) was a German politician .

Live and act

Otto Sidow was born the illegitimate son of Count Karl Friedrich Emil Ferdinand Hermann von Bredow (1822-1893) and his maid Caroline Sidow. His mother moved to Brandenburg an der Havel in 1867, with a payment from the count, and ran a retail business there in the Neustadt district .

After finishing school, Otto Sidow began his apprenticeship as a cigar maker in 1871, a trade in which the first trade union associations emerged. With a remarkable urge to educate, he was soon a “reader” of newspapers and a commentator on political events. This and his participation in the first meetings of the workers' association in Brandenburg made him familiar with the ideas of social self-confidence among workers at an early stage. In 1875 he went to Lorsch in Hesse for a year in order to gain further professional knowledge and to get to know the social conditions there.

After the social democratic associations were banned by the Socialist Act of 1878, he was involved in the conspiracy of maintaining the association structures, organized meetings and continued his self-didactic training. In addition, he was a union member and represented the 12th constituency at the General Assembly of German Tobacco Workers in May 1890.

In 1890, after the Socialist Act was repealed, he was a co-founder of the SPD local association in the city of Brandenburg, and in December he was also involved in creating the party's own daily newspaper, the Brandenburger Zeitung , which appeared on January 1, 1891. After a political trial in 1895, he was sentenced to six weeks in prison. In 1896 he took over the management of the publishing house of the Brandenburger Zeitung under the name “Otto Sidow & Co.”, which he held until his death. In the 1920s, Erich Baron and Friedrich Ebert junior were among its most famous editors . Otto Sidow's life's work, the Brandenburger Zeitung , was destroyed in 1933 when the National Socialists banned the newspaper, confiscated the considerable assets of the newspaper publisher in Brandenburg and Rathenow and transferred them to the state of Prussia . From 1898 Otto Sidow was a member of the SPD's city ​​council and in 1913 became its secretary. From 1919 to 1924 and from 1926 until his death he was head of the city council.

From 1919 until his retirement for reasons of age in March 1927, Otto Sidow was chairman of the SPD Provincial Association of Brandenburg and of the SPD sub-district of Brandenburg - Belzig - Rathenow. In 1919 he was elected  to the National Assembly and the Reichstag in constituency 4 - Potsdam 1 . Due to his age, he decided not to run again in 1925. In the last months of his life he wrote the first part of a description of the origins and early history of the organized Brandenburg labor movement up to the fall of the Socialist Law in 1890. His death prevented the planned second part.

In the SPD he belonged to the group of revisionists around Eduard Bernstein . That is why he was not seen as a champion during the GDR era, but rather accused of betraying socialism . In his local political activities he acted according to his motto: "The father city about the party" and, together with his friend, Mayor Walther Ausländer, played a major role in positive developments in local social policy in the city of Brandenburg between 1919 and 1933.

Honors

Honorary citizen of the city of Brandenburg an der Havel since December 21, 1922.

In 1927 a new side street in a new residential area on Wilhelmsdorfer Straße was named after him ( Otto-Sidow-Straße ). In 1936 the National Socialists deleted this name by renaming it to Immelmannstrasse after the world war pilot Max Immelmann; this was only corrected back after the end of the war in 1945. Today, as part of the central ring of Brandenburg, this street is a much longer main thoroughfare (part of the federal roads 1 and 102 ).

In 2000 the previously unnamed place at the intersection of Wilhelmsdorfer Str. And Otto-Sidow-Str. the name Otto-Sidow-Platz . (To this day (2012) the square is not indicated by a street sign, but only labeled on maps!)

plant

Through storm and stress. Reminder sheets on the history of the Brandenburg workers' movement up to the Socialist Law of 1878. Brandenburg 1927.

literature

• Handbook of the German constituent assembly. Weimar 1919. Biographical notes and pictures. Berlin 1919.
• Wolfgang Kusior: Otto Sidow. Local politician, publisher, social democrat . In: Marcus Alert and Wolfgang Kusior (eds.): 45 well-known Brandenburgers. Neddermeyer, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-933254-34-5 .
• Gerd Heinrich, Heß a. a. (Ed.): Stahl and Brennabor. The city of Brandenburg in the 19th and 20th centuries. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam 1998, ISBN 3-932981-22-7 .
• Dankward Sidow: Otto Sidow - life and work, conjectures and facts. In: Wolfgang Kusior, Thomas Reichel (Hrsg.): Memories of a red stronghold. On the history of social democracy in Brandenburg an der Havel. Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Brandenburg State Office, Potsdam 2012, pp. 64–91.
• Alfred Zeitz: On the history of the labor movement in the city of Brandenburg before the First World War. Potsdam 1965.
• Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1867-1933. Biographies, chronicles, election documentation. A handbook (= handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 7). Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-5192-0 (short version online as a biography of Otto Sidow . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP) ).

Web links

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

• Otto Sidow in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Otto Sidow's biography . In: Heinrich Best and Wilhelm H. Schröder : Database of Members of the National Assembly and the German Reichstag 1919–1933 (Biorab – Weimar)