Paul Trömel (politician)

Paul Trömel alias Tunzé as a soldier in the Foreign Legion

Paul Trömel after his return to Germany

Otto Paul Trömel (born July 29, 1881 in Gera ; † January 15, 1949 in Wiesbaden ) was a German mayor and politician of the Progressive People's Party (FVP), who was briefly a Foreign Legionnaire, the latter possibly involuntarily.

Life

Trömel was the son of the rope manufacturer Ernst Ferdinand Trömel (1846–1889) in Gera and his wife Johanne Christine Wilhelmine, née Finkbohner (1857–1934). On June 3, 1903, he married Marie Elisabeth Clara Körner (1879–1965) in Wahlershausen near Kassel. Paul Trömel was an Evangelical Lutheran . He and his wife had three children: Rosemarie (1904–1991), Hans-Heinz (1906–1947) and Irmgard (1909–2005).

Trömel attended the citizens' school in Gera from 1885 to 1889/90 and then the Rutheneum grammar school there . After graduating from high school, theological, scientific and philosophical self-study followed. In 1899 he was a volunteer with the 7th Westphalian Infantry Regiment Vogel von Falckenstein and was promoted to lieutenant in the 56th Infantry Regiment in Wesel on January 30, 1901 . In 1903 he retired from military service. He was actually supposed to take over his father's company. However, this did not happen "because of circumstances that occurred" and he began to study law . He broke off this course in 1904 and was mayor of Kirchditmold from February 1904 to 1906 . When Kirchditmold was incorporated into Kassel in 1906 , he resigned as mayor and was mayor of Hirschberg (Saale) from October 22, 1906 to July 18, 1908 . He was also a member of the district committee in Schleiz . From October 27, 1907 to July 16, 1908, he was a member of the Reuss Younger Line Landtag for the Free People's Party (FVP), where he was secretary. After he left the state parliament, Heinrich Knoch was re-elected for him.

From July 1908 he was mayor of the West Pomeranian city ​​of Usedom . In the Reichstag election in 1907 he was a candidate for the Progressive People's Party in the Reichstag constituency of Ückermünde-Usedom-Wollin; But he had to cancel this candidacy because of a nervous disease (he was "8 weeks in a state of twilight").

At the beginning of autumn 1911 he had already been psychiatric examined twice in Greifswald . The reason was that he had disappeared for almost three months and then reappeared in Paris . In June 1912 disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him, but he was acquitted.

After a district council meeting in Swinoujscie on March 28, 1913 , he disappeared without a trace. On March 31, 1913, a military passport of the Foreign Legion in the name of Paul Tunze was issued for him in Paris . According to his autobiography, he had lost his memory and only found it again in the third week of his training with the Foreign Legion. He was transferred to the Foreign Legion in Oran and Saida in Algeria for training.

In May 1913, his family tried to get him released from the Foreign Legion and returned to Germany. The trigger was a letter that Trömel had written to his sister Frieda Bernpointner, who lived in Landshut , in which he asked for support. After that, he had committed himself to the Foreign Legion in a state of “absent-mindedness” and only now woke up. His sister suffered a nervous breakdown at this news and, on medical advice, had to take a cure in the Allgäu . Her husband, the government assessor Karl Franz Xaver Maria Bernpointner, informed Trömel's wife, who was with relatives in Würzburg .

The city council decided on June 30, 1913 a one-time financial support for the family's efforts. The government was also involved. The State Secretary in the Foreign Office requested the files on Trömel from the Stettin Higher Presidium in order to provide diplomatic support.

Trömel was examined in the military hospital in Oran and Saida in July and August and, as a result of the examinations, was released from the Foreign Legion in November 1913. The transport ticket for the return from Oran via Marseille to Germany is dated November 21, 1913. At his own request, the city council removed him from his post as mayor on July 18, 1913. In 1914 he published the autobiography From Mayor to Foreign Legionnaire - The Riddle of My Life; A novel I experienced myself. He wrote the preface to this autobiography in Zurich .

In January 1915 there was a note in the Greifswalder Zeitung: “Mayor a. D. Trömel from Usedom has now settled in Greater Berlin. He runs a legal office in Charlottenburg and recommends his advice in tax matters, administrative and insurance matters as well as in all legal questions. ”On March 11, 1917, the Usedom police issued a management certificate. From August 1908 to March 1914 nothing detrimental came to official knowledge.

Paul Trömel lived with his family in Berlin for many years . In 1940 the entry Paul Trömel, Director, can be found in the Berlin address book . After the end of the war there are files in a ruling chamber in Kornwestheim zu Trömel. The small town of Bürg bei Winnenden was specified as the place of residence . Trömel then moved to Wiesbaden , where his daughter Irmgard was engaged as a ballet master and first solo dancer in the State Theater from 1946 to 1947 . On January 15, 1949, the retired director Paul Trömel died of a pulmonary embolism in the municipal hospitals in Wiesbaden . Chronic osteomyelitis (inflammation of the bone marrow) on the 9th and 10th thoracic vertebrae is also noted in the death entry .

The disappearance and return of Trömel were a nationwide topic in the press. The Kölnische Zeitung wrote of one of the "strangest stories from the Foreign Legion". Reports appeared in the Kreuzzeitung , the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten , the Hannoversche Kurier , the Schwäbischer Merkur , among others . The international press, especially French papers, including Le Matin and L'Écho de Paris , reported.

literature

• Reyk Seela : Diets and regional representations in the Russian states 1848 / 67–1923. Biographical handbook (= Parliaments in Thuringia 1809–1952. Part 2). G. Fischer, Jena et al. 1996, ISBN 3-437-35046-3 , pp. 315-316.
• Herbert Frey: Mayor Trömel: His experiences in d. Foreign Legion; In the twilight z. Foreign Legion; An unsolved riddle, [1913], DNB
• Volker Mergenthaler: Völkerschau, cannibalism, Foreign Legion: On the Aesthetics of Transgression (1897-1936). Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-484-15109-9 , pp. 164-175.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Copy from the marriage register of the city of Kassel . No. 10-17 November 1977.
2. ↑ Paul Trömel: From Mayor to Foreign Legionnaire, The Riddle of My Life . Wendt & Co., Dresden 1914, p. 112 .
3. ↑ ^{a b} Nordkurier of March 29, 2021, page 20, What was the matter with this mayor ?, Article by Bernd Jordan, Lassan.
4. ↑ Berlin address book . 1925, p. 3308 .
5. ↑ Berlin address book . 1940, p. 3165 .
6. ↑ Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Spruchkammer der Internierlager. In: Trömel, Otto Paul, 1 index card. State Archives Ludwigsburg, 1945, accessed on April 3, 2021 . 
7. ↑ Death entry of the city of Wiesbaden . No. 107 , 1949.
8. ↑ Kölnische Zeitung of August 31, 1913, quoted from Mergenthaler, p. 165.
9. ↑ Mergenthaler, p. 167.
10. ↑ Mergenthaler, p. 170.