Councilor
A councilor (in medieval Germany also Ratmann ) and Council mistress or councilor is a deputy in the Municipal Corporation a municipality (ie in Germany mostly in the City Council or Municipal Council ).
A gender neutral term is councilor . In Lower Saxony, however, this also includes the mayor, as he is a member of the council by virtue of his office, but without being a councilor in the above sense. The councilor is usually a member of a party or group of voters ; Councilors are rarely chosen as individual applicants . In the work of the council, the councilor usually serves in several council committees , which prepare decision proposals for the entire council .
In Germany, council members are usually elected every five years. The council activity is an honorary position . Only with extended tasks or an extended area of responsibility is it possible to exercise the council mandate as a full-time professional politician without any other gainful employment: as a parliamentary group chairman or as a full-time mayor .
history
The office of councilor arose with the formation of council constitutions in the German cities from around 1200. This process began about a century later than in the northern Italian cities, where the consules became the bearers of a "communal authority that subverted the civil organization". What the council bodies have in common is that their representatives were made up of men of the upper class from families who owned land and later also worked commercially. One or more mayors have been at its head since the 14th century . The powers of the council included tax matters, monetary affairs and external representation. How the councilors were selected, whether and how the council renewed itself (mostly in accordance with the right to self-supplement), what dependency it was on the sovereign (tending to decrease), what size it was (often 12 or a multiple thereof), whether it also included master craftsmen (often not in the late Middle Ages), whether the council membership lasted for life (often), whether the ministerial had access to the office (more in the early days), whether there was a rotation of active and dormant council offices, all of this varied from city to city regulated differently and subject to constant changes. After the cooperative elements disappeared from the council constitutions with the displacement of the craftsmen towards the end of the Middle Ages, the proportion of academically educated lawyers in the council colleges, which were becoming more oligarchic , increased in modern times .
In many cases these structures survived the end of the Middle Ages and lasted until the constitutional upheavals in the 19th century. At that time (in Bremen : between 1810 and 1822) the terms “council” and “councilor” were replaced by “senate” and “senator” in the Hanseatic cities. The transition from the principle of self-completion to the appointment of councilors by more or less democratically elected bodies did not always develop continuously and not everywhere in the same way. The clearest difference to modern council constitutions lies in the lack of a separation of powers : councilors were also court lords , whereby blood jurisdiction was often reserved for the rule of the country .
See also
literature
- Paul-Joachim Heinig : "Advice". In: Lexikon des Mittelalters , Vol. VII, Munich 1995, Sp. 451–453.
- Klaus Militzer: Council constitutions and social stratifications . In: Hanse. Cities. Bünde , Magdeburg 1996, vol. 1, pp. 152-160 (on the north German cities).
- Horst Rabe: The Council of the Lower Swabian Imperial Cities. In: Research on German legal history IV , 1966 (on conditions in southern Germany).
