Paul Müller (trade unionist)

Paul Müller (born March 6, 1875 in Kolberg , † October 7, 1925 in Hamburg ) was a German seaman , journalist and union official .

Live and act

Paul Müller was the illegitimate son of a maid who grew up in Pomerania and attended an elementary school there. He then worked as a seaman. During the Hamburg port workers' strike in 1896/97 , he last enrolled as a quartermaster on a ship in November 1986 . Müller, who at that time spoke several languages ​​and had studied classical literature, settled in St. Pauli . His first marriage was Dorothea Niemann in 1898, who died in 1902 without children. The marriage with Frieda Kopplin in 1913 did not result in any children either.

Paul Müller worked actively in the Association of Sailors from Hamburg, Altona and the surrounding area and tried to convince several similar unions in Hamburg and the surrounding area of ​​the advantages of working together. In negotiations he represented radical, egalitarian views, combined with convincing skills as a speaker. The Hamburg seafarers quickly trusted Müller and elected him full-time chairman of the seamen's association for Germany when it was founded in February 1898. He shared the office with Albert Störmer until 1900 and continued to run it alone until 1910. He then went to Berlin, where he worked as a secretary on the main board of the German Transport Workers' Association for the interests of seafarers and inland waterwaymen.

As a union official, Müller advocated a revision of the seaman's code of 1872. From 1903 he tried to establish proof of work and to create a union support fund. He participated as a lobbyist in several institutions, including from 1898 in the Society for the Rescue of Shipwrecked People , from 1904 in the Central Council of the International Transport Workers' Union and from 1907 in the Reich Insurance Office . Müller, who had been an assessor on the board of the Seeberufsgenossenschaft since January 1918, also tried to gain political influence. He ran for the SPD in the Reichstag elections in 1903 , 1907 and 1912 in the constituency 15 of Schleswig-Holstein, but could not win a seat. Nonetheless, he made documents available to SPD MPs on the situation of the seafarers, who carried them to the Reichstag.

Müller, who acted aggressively and followed national-chauvinist standpoints, published the association magazine Der Seemann since 1899 . Most of the texts on the paper, which from 1913 on was called Die Seefahrt , were written by Müller himself. He continually pointed out the inadequate living and working conditions on German merchant ships and harshly criticized the shipowners and the government. He developed the association magazine into one of the most extreme trade union publications in German-speaking countries.

Müller, who during the First World War expressed himself increasingly extreme national chauvinistic, became active at the end of the war at the Reich level. Since January 24, 1918 he was a member of the Reich Committee for the Reconstruction of the German Merchant Fleet. During peace negotiations in Spa , Trier and Brussels in January and February 1919 , he vigorously advocated not having to reduce the number of German ships. From 1920 Müller was a member of the economic and social policy committee of the advisory chamber of the Provisional Reich Economic Council .

Since the beginning of 1918, left-wing members of the SPD and opposition members within the Müller union have been heavily criticizing. In addition to the work in the trade association and in the Reich Committee, they particularly criticized the fact that it openly showed sympathy for the Pan-German Association and its territorial policy. Müller, who had meanwhile moved from Altona to Hamburg, initially received support from the board of the German Transport Workers' Association. The association founded its own Hamburg imperial section for seafarers there, with which it did Müller a great favor. After Müller had criticized the Reichsflagge “alien” in June 1921 , the board of directors could no longer prevent a formal committee procedure. Before the official expulsion came into effect on August 8, 1921, Müller voluntarily left the union and the SPD.

Together with seafarers who represented German-national views, Müller then founded the Central Association of German Sea and Fishermen and from October 1921 published its own magazine, Die Deutsche Flagge . In order to be able to finance this, he solicited donations from shipping companies. On December 11, 1921, Müller took over the chairmanship of the association in Bremen . He pursued the goal of founding an independent party of the Germans , which was supposed to unite those with a German nationality. After he had promoted his idea in July 1922 with social revolutionary nuances, the shipowners stopped their payments due to conflicts of interest. The association newspaper was last printed in May 1923.

At the end of 1924, Müller's cooperative involvement ended. He then took on commercial activities for a few months at the ship brokerage office Petersen & Volckens. Müller, who moved to Altona in 1925, died of colon cancer in October of the same year in the Freemason Hospital in Hamburg.

literature

• Sibylle Küttner: Müller, Paul . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 246-247 .