Paul Brocker

Paul Heinrich Bröcker (born July 2, 1875 in Hamburg ; † May 13, 1948 there ) was a German journalist and writer .

Live and act

Paul Bröcker was born in Hamburg. It is not known what form of schooling he received. Bröcker himself stated that he had not finished high school and learned autodidactically. It is also not finally clear whether he began training as a teacher and later dropped out. Bröcker initially wrote for the Hamburger Echo and in the 1890s switched to the Harburger Volksblatt as an editor . As reasons for the change, he himself named an award-winning contribution that appeared in the Hamburger Echo and a recommendation by Otto Stolten . Due to health problems and labor law conflicts, the employment relationship ended in 1901. Bröcker himself later considered his commitment to journalistically objective work to be decisive.

Bröcker, who described himself as a “birth-related social democrat” and belonged to the SPD , wrote an article in 1903 for the Socialist monthly magazine in which he recommended the ideal of culture described in the Kunstwart . Until 1904, Bröcker also wrote for a party paper for the SPD. The employment there ended for similar reasons as before with the Harburger Volksblatt. Since he no longer wanted to share the opinions represented by the party on issues relating to army, naval and colonial policy, he resigned from the SPD a little later.

Bröcker, who named the “poet philosopher” Johannes Wedde as a role model and wrote poems like him and was interested in Gustav Theodor Fechner , John Ruskin and Theodor Lipps , from then on dealt with current topics in building culture. His contributions have appeared in the Hamburg Correspondents and the Hamburg Foreign Gazette . Around 1906 he met Gustav Schiefler , who two years later wrote the foreword to Bröcker's work About Hamburg's New Architecture. Contemporary reflections from a layperson wrote. It was one of his first independent publications. Around 1909 Bröcker came into contact with the architect Fritz Höger . Both wrote together in 1910 The Architecture of the Hamburg Commercial Building . Although Bröcker was of the opinion that he was a major inspiration for Höger's office building architecture and that he himself could therefore be part of Höger's fees, the two were linked by a lifelong friendship. Bröcker himself advocated combining brick construction with contemporary iron structures. He saw therein a contemporary and useful further development of the half-timbered architecture "Lower Saxony tribal style".

In 1910 Bröcker wrote “My Home Book”, which can be regarded as his most important work. The journalist also started the monthly magazine “Der Hamburger”, for which he wrote most of the articles himself. In addition to guest contributions by Alfred Lichtwark , Oskar Schwindrazheim and Werner Jakstein , among others , Bröcker dealt with a wide range of topics in his own articles, sometimes lengthy. Among other things, he wrote about a new building maintenance law, the Morocco crisis , the design of the preschool, women's suffrage and peasant ceramics. Bröcker underpinned his theses with statistics and quotations. Because of his “national view” he criticized social democracy in a chauvinistic style, but also sensitively described everyday problems. The magazine appeared until 1913. Brocker himself attributed the lack of demand to his increasingly "naive philosophical" contributions.

In 1911, Bröcker was one of the co-initiators of the “Home Protection Association in Hamburg” and took over the post of deputy chairman after the association was founded. During the First World War he went to Berlin , where he worked for the War Department of the War Ministry. He later got a job at the German National Handicraftsmen Association , for which he wrote in 1919 on the history of the workers' movements and trade unions. In his contributions, he called for people to pursue the “idea of ​​value”, which should ensure that human labor was no longer traded as a commodity through the purchase of high-quality goods and that the differences between employees and employers in a “national community” were eliminated. In 1931 Bröcker dealt again with architecture in a commemorative publication of the association. The reason for this was the opening of an administration building on Hamburg's Holstenwall.

Brocker, who suffered from lack of money and a severe stomach ailment, belonged to the People's Political Association during this time . In 1933 he submitted an unsuccessful application to join the NSDAP . In his denazification questionnaire, Bröcker cited the reason for his rejection that he was a Freemason . He wrote as a journalist until 1937, mostly dealing with non-political articles on the linguistic knowledge of the Low German language. He worked for the Hanseatic City of Hamburg until his retirement in 1944. According to Bröcker, this was “desk activity” that was not explained further.

Paul Bröcker died in May 1948. Only a few letters are known of his private correspondence, in which he mostly asked for money. The draftsman and architect Ferdinand Sckopp, who illustrated some of Broecker's late works, described his childhood friend as gifted intellectually and hungry for knowledge. He suffered lifelong from being unsuccessful. The architect Fritz Höger emphasized Brocker's importance for homeland security in his draft of a funeral speech that was not held. This was reminiscent of statements in the press on Broecker's 60th birthday, in which the journalist was described as a “champion of the homeland idea”. Broecker's last work was published a year after his death. In Bauhütten belief. A commitment to Freemasonry , in the sense of his early ideas, he described the Bauhütte and Freemasonry as models, according to whose ideals war-torn Germany could be rebuilt in a “working group of the future”.

literature

• Jörg Schilling: Brocker, Paul . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 68-69 .