Raoul Bumballa

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Raoul Bumballa (born September 10, 1895 in Troppau , Austrian Silesia , † July 25, 1947 in Vienna ) was an Austrian journalist and politician ( ÖVP ).

Life

Bumballa (the name is stressed on the first syllable) had held a doctorate since 1921, but had never obtained the doctorate. In the Vienna address book he appeared in 1921/22 as a company partner with the address Titlgasse 16 in a villa district in the Lainz district of the 13th district ; it cannot be found in the 1926, 1931 and 1938 editions.

During the Nazi regime , Bumballa was arrested in 1938 and was imprisoned for four and a half years in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. After his release he became involved in the Austrian resistance movement O5 . In contemporary literature he is sometimes referred to as the spokesman for the Austrian resistance movement O5. On the other hand, he was attested that he had played himself in the foreground at the end of 1944 / beginning of 1945 and that he claimed a spokesperson function, but that the O5 had not formally legitimized him to do so. However, Bumballa was indisputably chairman of the so-called "Committee of Seven" of the resistance movement.

This included people of all political shades, but political professionals from the time of the First Republic were hardly represented. In contrast to Karl Renner , who based his plans for post-war Austria on the Federal Constitution of 1920 , O5 had not prepared any concrete considerations for the time after the defeat of the Nazi regime and assumed that the state would have to be re-established from the ground up become.

The representatives of the parties active until 1934, however, immediately reactivated their organizations and entered into political competition that alienated them from the resistance movement. Only the communists attached importance to formally non-partisan umbrella organizations in order to set the tone in these; Once they had recognized the worthlessness of the resistance movement for their intentions, it was they (as Adolf Schärf remembered in 1948) who, with the help of the Russians, took care of their thorough handling. Apparently they were suddenly no longer at all comfortable with the fact that there were still others besides them who could rightly attribute themselves to the liberation of Austria; later, she particularly disliked the former leader of the resistance movement, Dr. Bumballa. The end that the resistance movement found was, according to Schärf, undeservedly banal .

At the suggestion of the ÖVP , on April 27, 1945, Karl Renner accepted Bumballa into the first post-war government, the Provisional State Government , formed with the consent of the Soviet Union . At that time the ministers were referred to as state secretaries, the current state secretaries as undersecretaries. Bumballa became one of three undersecretaries in the State Office for Home Affairs , headed by the communist Franz Honner . His difficult task was to ensure with his colleague Oskar Helmer from the SPÖ that Honner did not turn the interior department into a power base preparing for communist rule.

On September 8, 1945 the election of the Presidium of the ÖVP took place. Leopold Kunschak was elected honorary president, Leopold Figl as federal party chairman . Raoul Bumballa was elected second of three vice chairmen. If Figl came from the farmers ' union and his two other deputies came from the workers' and employees' union or from the economic union , Bumballa was called a representative of the resistance movement, although it no longer existed.

As Schärf emphasized in his observation of competition in 1950, in his opinion the ÖVP was initially in 1945 a strongly left-wing bourgeois party [...]; the fact that it advocated the management of essential necessities and the nationalization of key industries, while the communists were against it, justified the derision that the communists were on the right wing of the People's Party. [...] With the expansion of the party to the western federal states, its character has changed - it has developed to the right. [...] Dr. Bumballa […] resigned from his position on November 14, 1945 shortly before the elections, as he claimed, because he could not agree with the clericalization and the party's new right-wing course.

According to Oliver Rathkolb , Bumballa resigned from the ÖVP on November 2, 1945, but, at Renner's insistence, remained active in the provisional state government that was in office until December 20, 1945. In the Federal Government of Figl I appointed by Renner as the first Federal President of the Second Republic on December 20, 1945 , Bumballa no longer held any function.

Honorary grave for Bumballa at Hietzingen cemetery

Bumballa died (after Czeike ) in the Unter-St.-Veit part of the 13th district in Vienna in a villa at Larochegasse 33 and was buried on July 28, 1947 in the Hietzinger Friedhof in an honorary grave (group 16, grave no. 53) buried; the grave still exists today.

The central organ of the SPÖ , Arbeiter-Zeitung , wrote in an obituary that National Socialism had dragged Bumballa out of the tranquility of bourgeois life into a kind of political adventurism . After the expiry of his government mandate his name was again by the public gone, when he was arrested because of the transgression of an economic law, but was soon released on again . Raoul Bumballa died of a heart attack.

literature

  • Oliver Rathkolb : Raoul Bumballa, a political nonconformist 1945. Case study on the function of the O5 in the resistance and in party restoration , in: Rudolf G. Ardelt / Wolfgang JA Huber / Anton Staudinger (eds.): Suppression and emancipation. Festschrift for Erika Weinzierl . For his 60th birthday , Geyer Edition, Vienna / Salzburg 1985, ISBN 3-8509-0119-X , pp. 295–317

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oliver Rathkolb (see literature), p. 296; Note in: Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (Ed.): Yearbook 2009. Focus: Armed Resistance - Resistance in the Military , Editor: Christine Schindler, LIT Verlag Berlin / Münster / Vienna / Zurich / London 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-50010 -6 , p. 102, note 32
  2. ↑ Lehmann's Allgemeiner Wohnungs-Anzeiger für Wien , edition 1921/22, Volume 2, p. 161
  3. ↑ Werner Sabitzer: State Secretaries in the Ministry of the Interior , in: Journal Public Security , Vienna, Issue 7–8 / 2011, p. 33 f .; PDF file on the website of the Federal Ministry of the Interior
  4. ↑ Andreas Hilger , Mike Schmeitzner, Clemens Vollnhals (eds.): Sovietization or neutrality? Options of Soviet occupation policy in Germany and Austria 1945–1955 , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-36906-7 , p. 380, note 40
  5. ^ Adolf Schärf : April 1945 in Vienna , Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1948, p. 96
  6. ^ Adolf Schärf : Between Democracy and People's Democracy. Austria's unification and rebuilding in 1945 , Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1950, p. 87
  7. ↑ Josef Kocensky (ed.): Documentation on Austrian contemporary history. 1945–1955 , Jugend und Volk, Vienna 1970, ISBN 3-7141-6513-4 , p. 114
  8. ^ Adolf Schärf : Between Democracy and People's Democracy , p. 84 f.
  9. ^ Neue Zeit , social democratic newspaper, Graz, October 17, 1945, p. 1, crisis in the ÖVP
  10. ↑ Oliver Rathkolb (see literature), p. 307; Note in: Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance (Ed.): Yearbook 2009 , as before, p. 112, note 77
  11. ↑ Arbeiter-Zeitung , Vienna, No. 172, July 26, 1947, p. 2
personal data
SURNAME Bumballa, Raoul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian journalist and politician (ÖVP)
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Opava , Austrian Silesia
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1947
Place of death Vienna