Otto van Volxem

Otto van Volxem (born August 18, 1913 in Hamm ; † February 16, 1994 in Konz-Oberemmel ) was a German winery owner and politician ( CDU ). From 1957 to 1959 he was Minister of the Interior and Social Affairs of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate and from 1959 to 1971 President of the State Parliament.

Life

Otto van Volxem was born the son of a doctor. After attending primary school and graduating from high school Aloisiuskolleg in Bad Godesberg , he studied agriculture and viticulture at the Trier viticulture college from 1933 to 1937 and then took over his parents' winery in Oberemmel on the Saar . He did military service in 1935/36 and took part in the Second World War as a soldier from 1939 to 1945 , initially with the infantry and after suffering a wound as a non-commissioned officer with the artillery. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the US, from which he was released a short time later. He then managed the winery in Oberemmel again, which he subsequently rebuilt. In 1964 he became chairman of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine advertising company and was its honorary chairman until 1980. He was also chairman of the Rhineland-Palatinate state board of trustees for Indivisible Germany from 1961 to 1967 .

Van Volxem, who was a member of the CDU from 1946, was a member of the Saarburg district council from 1948 to 1957 . In the state elections in 1951 , he was elected for the first time as a member of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament, to which he was a member until 1971. From 1959 to 1971 he was President of the State Parliament. He was also a member of the Oberemmel municipal council and a member of the council of the Verbandsgemeinde Konz , where he was chairman of the CDU parliamentary group from 1974 to 1979.

From October 15, 1957 to May 19, 1959, van Volxem served as Minister of the Interior and Social Affairs in the state government of Rhineland-Palatinate led by Prime Minister Peter Altmeier ( Altmeier III cabinet ).

Otto van Volxem had been married to Josefa Maria Reiter since 1948 and had four children.

Honors

• 1963: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1966: Leibniz Medal of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz
• Honorary member of the Catholic student association K.St.V. Ketteler Mainz

literature

• Stefan Brink: Otto van Volxem (1959–1971). In: The Presidents of the State Parliament 1946–2006. Biographical sketches from six decades of Rhineland-Palatinate parliamentary history. (= Series of publications by the Rhineland-Palatinate Landtag, issue 31), Mainz 2006. pp. 124–148. ( PDF; 2.2 MB )
• Herrmann AL Degener , Walter Habel (Ed.): Who is who? The German who's who. Volume 21, Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 1981. p. 1202.

Web links

• Entry on Otto van Volxem in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database
• Otto van Volxem , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 07/1960 from February 8, 1960, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Markus Schäfer: Volxem, Otto van. In: Data handbook on the history of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament 1947–2003. (= Publications of the Parliament's Commission for the History of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, Volume 26), v. Hase & Koehler, Mainz 2005. p. 150.