Peter von Oertzen

Peter von Oertzen (left) with Hans-Jochen Vogel , 1975

Peter von Oertzen (born September 2, 1924 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 16, 2008 in Hanover ) was a German political scientist and politician. Before leaving in March 2005, he was a member of the SPD for 59 years . From 1970 to 1974 he was the Lower Saxony Minister of Culture in I. Cabinet of Alfred Kubel , also program masterminds of the SPD in the tradition of Democratic Socialism .

Life

Origin and university career

Peter von Oertzen came from a socially conservative family of the Mecklenburg land nobility. His father was the national conservative journalist Friedrich Wilhelm von Oertzen . Politically, Peter von Oertzen was significantly shaped by the time of National Socialism and the war . From 1942 to 1945 he served in the Wehrmacht . In 1946 he joined the SPD and in the following years was involved in the SDS , which at the time was still loyal to the party . He called Erich Gerlach his “political teacher” . He studied history , philosophy and sociology at the University of Göttingen , received his doctorate and qualified as a professor there. 1963 was v. Oertzen was appointed full professor of political science at the then Technical University of Hanover, the forerunner of the current University of Hanover .

Critic of the Godesberg program

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, he was looking for a third way beyond real socialism on the one hand and capitalism and anti-communism on the other. He believed he could build a left- wing socialist wing within the SPD that would pull the entire party to the left.

He was therefore one of the few Social Democrats who actively, but in vain, fought against the SPD's turn to the Godesberg Program in 1959, and one of the 16 delegates who ultimately refused to consent. He also put forward an alternative proposal that emphasized the principles of democratic socialism and called for extensive socialization, especially from banks and insurance companies. The program aligns the party “one-sidedly with the parliamentary debate”. It blurs "the class situation and the class interests of the workforce", in this context the offers to the self-employed middle class are also "questionable". In addition, von Oertzen pointed out that the program as a whole was supported by a hardly justified economic optimism: “The authors basically do not believe in the possibility of serious economic setbacks”. In terms of content, he partially agreed with Wolfgang Abendroth , whose counter-draft seemed too dogmatic to him. In connection with the discussion of the Godesberg program, von Oertzen was one of the authors of the journal Sozialistische Politik .

60s and 70s

In the 1960s, he published the workbooks for left-wing social democrats and trade unionists. The student movement of 1968, during which he co-founded the Club Voltaire in Hanover , gave his positions in the SPD a boost. From 1970 to 1983 he was its district chairman in Hanover , from 1970 to 1978 chairman of the state committee of the SPD Lower Saxony and from 1970 to 1974 also Minister of Education in Lower Saxony. In this office he successfully initiated the university and educational reform of the time. He was a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament for 19 years .

From 1973 to 1993 he was also a member of the SPD party executive. In this function, from 1973 to 1975, he headed the SPD's program commission, which set out the framework for orientation 85 , at that time an attempt to add a medium-term program perspective to the Godesberg program. He then co- authored the SPD's 1989 Berlin program . He founded the SPD's science forum, rebuilt its party school and became its head.

As a member of the SPD party executive he took part in important discussions about the left, the right, terrorism and a red-green coalition. He also discussed about and with the dissident Rudolf Bahro .

Professional bans

In 1973 von Oertzen initially supported the professional bans against West German communists initiated by the then Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt and thereby lost a lot of reputation among left-wing socialist groups. He saw the legal measure as directed primarily against the DKP , but soon realized that socialists of independent or Trotskyist origin were also affected by it. He then campaigned for their rehabilitation and considered the affirmation of the professional bans to be his greatest political mistake.

80s and 90s

At the beginning of the 1980s von Oertzen returned to the university and devoted himself more and more to political science. After German reunification in 1990, he wrote a class analysis of today's Federal Republic with: Social milieus in social structural change . He followed the politics of his party more and more critically and founded the " Loccumer Initiative Critical Scientists " (LI). Since then he has been known as a critical co-discussant both in the PDS and in the “Friends of the Anti-Capitalist Left”. The latter was a current of the 2004 newly founded " Work & Social Justice - The Alternative Choice " (WASG).

Berlin program

In the course of the SPD policy debate that led to the SPD's Berlin program in 1989, Peter von Oertzen was involved with Horst Peter in bringing together the various leftist currents in the SPD. In 1994 he was co-editor of the Spw - magazine for socialist politics and economy .

Von Oertzen wanted to make Karl Marx's social analysis usable for the SPD in the Berlin program as in all of his work - also in the deliberate successor to Rosa Luxemburg . But as a democratic socialist, he clearly distinguished himself from all actually existing socialist and communist systems from the very beginning and, on the other hand, emphasized the inalienability of democracy and individual freedom. A topic that was taken up again and again in his academic and political work was council democracy or workers' self-administration as an extension of democratic principles to the field of the economy. One of his key messages was: "The more democratic, the more left".

Key messages of the Berlin program that he helped formulate are:

“The bourgeois revolutions of modern times have conjured up freedom, equality and fraternity more than they realized. That is why the labor movement has protested the ideals of these revolutions: a solidary society with equal freedom for all people. It is their basic historical experience that repairs to capitalism are not enough. A new order of economy and society is necessary. "

Leaving the party in 2005

In 2005 von Oertzen left the SPD after almost 60 years. The reason was his protest against Agenda 2010 . In his resignation statement, he declared that capitalism was endangering humanity, and added that it was and will remain a socialist and is therefore no longer in the right-left position in the SPD: joined the SPD. ”He complained that at the moment there was no party that represented the views of big business more than the SPD. "I do not expect anything from social democracy as an organizational form of theoretical endeavor (...) the SPD is absolutely unable to cope with the wider and deeper problems of capitalism."

Membership in the WASG

Von Oertzen was a member of the WASG for a short time after he left the SPD, but left it at the beginning of 2006 because of the foreseeable merger with the PDS . The patronage assumed on January 5, 2006 for the WASG-related educational community SALZ continued. Oertzen also worked with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation , of which he was part of the board of trustees.

Appreciation

The conservative social philosopher Günter Rohrmoser , with whom he worked in the Marxism Commission of the Evangelical Church in Germany , honored him for his human fairness and his passionate commitment to humanizing our society.

estate

Peter von Oertzen's estate, which contains, among other things, his doctoral thesis and habilitation thesis as well as numerous letters and manuscripts, is stored in the University Archives in Hanover. His grave is in the New St. Nikolai Cemetery in Hanover.

Honors

• 1996 Wilhelm Dröscher Prize
• 1998 honorary doctorate from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

Works (selection)

• The social function of constitutional positivism. A sociological study of the development of formalistic positivism in German political science . Edited and with an afterword by Dieter Sterzel, edition suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-00660-6 (dissertation from 1953)
• Works councils in the November Revolution. A political science study of the ideas and structure of the industrial and economic workers' councils in the German revolution of 1918/19 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1963 (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties, volume 25), habilitation
• For a new reformism . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-87975-264-8 .
• Democracy and socialism between politics and science . Offizin-Verlag, Hannover 2004, ISBN 3-930345-44-7 .

literature

• Wolfgang Jüttner , Gabriele Andretta, Stefan Schostok (eds.): Politics for social democracy. Memory of Peter von Oertzen . forward book, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86602-924-8
• Loccumer Initiative of Critical Scholars (ed.): On the function of the left intellectual - today. In memoriam Peter von Oertzen . Offizin-Verlag, Hannover 2009 (= critical interventions 10), ISBN 978-3-930345-67-0
• Jürgen Seifert , Heinz Thörmer, Klaus Wettig (eds.): Social or socialist democracy? Contributions to the history of the left in the Federal Republic. A gift for Peter von Oertzen on his 65th birthday . SP-Verlag, Marburg 1989, ISBN 3-924800-56-1
• Jürgen Seifert: Peter von Oertzen: Democracy and cooperation in the world of work. In: Hans Karl Rupp, Thomas Noetzel: Power, Freedom, Democracy. Vol. 2: The second generation of West German political science , Schüren, Marburg 1994, pp. 161–171, ISBN 3-89472-100-6 .
• Gregor Kritidis, From Cooperation to Confrontation. Wolfgang Abendroth and Peter von Oertzen. On the structure and genesis of the "Marburger" and "Hannoversche" schools. In: Thomas Kroll / Tilman Reitz (eds.), Intellectuals in the Federal Republic of Germany. Göttingen 2013. pp. 185–199, ISBN 978-3-525-300459 .
• Gregor Kritidis: Left Socialist Opposition in the Adenauer Era. A contribution to the early history of the Federal Republic . Offizin, Hannover 2008, ISBN 978-3-930345-61-8 .
• Max Reinhardt: VI. Peter von Oertzen . In: Max Reinhardt 2011: Rise and Crisis of the SPD. Wings and representatives of a pluralistic people's party, Nomos, Baden-Baden, pp. 233–282, ISBN 978-3-8329-6575-4 .
• Philipp Kufferath: Peter von Oertzen (1924-2008). A political and intellectual biography . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8353-3049-8 .

Web links

Commons : Peter von Oertzen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Comrades battle of sharp blades: Peter von Oertzen has not yet lost courage ( memento from September 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
• Literature by and about Peter von Oertzen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article about the handover of the estate to the Hanover University Library by his daughters ( memento from October 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Klaus Wettig: The social democrat Peter von Oertzen. In: Wolfgang Jüttner; Gabriele Andretta; Stefan Schostok (Ed.): Politics for Social Democracy. Remembering Peter von Oertzen, Berlin: vorwärts 2009, pp. 12–28, here p. 14.
2. ↑ Carola Dietze: "After an absence of seventeen years ..." The Blue Book. A document about the beginnings of sociology in Göttingen after 1945 under Helmuth Plessner . In: Jahrbuch für Soziologiegeschichte , 1997/98 (2001), pp. 243-300, here p. 251.
3. ↑ Quoted from Jürgen Seifert : Peter von Oertzen: Democracy and cooperation in the world of work. In: Hans Karl Rupp, Thomas Noetzel: Power, Freedom, Democracy. Vol. 2: The second generation of West German political science , Schüren, Marburg 1994, pp. 161–171, here p. 162, ISBN 3-89472-100-6 .
4. ↑ On this criticism of Oertzens see Grebing: Ideengeschichte des Sozialismus in Deutschland , p. 450, there also the quotations from Oertzens.
5. ^ Klaus Mlynek: Student Protests. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , pp. 611f.
6. ↑ See Peter von Oertzen: Why not a red-green coalition? In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1982, pp. 35 ( online - 27 September 1982 ).
7. ^ SPD: Former leftist Peter von Oertzen resigns. In: Spiegel Online. March 17, 2005, accessed March 31, 2016 . 
8. ↑ Norbert Seitz: The SPD and its unloved thought leaders. In: Deutschlandfunk broadcast “Essay and Discourse”. June 5, 2011, accessed December 2, 2018 . 
9. ↑ http://www.gfk-web.de/inhalt/leitthemen/080416.html
10. ↑ Rüdiger Meise: yellowed treasure for the university archive, in Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, August 29, 2009, page 17th