Legal protection room
The legal protection hall is a former club house in Bildstock, today a district of Friedrichsthal in the Saarbrücken regional association . The building was built between 1891 and 1892 as a meeting place for the legal protection association for the mining population of the Bonn Oberbergamtsbezirks , an early union organization of miners in the Saar area . The legal protection hall is considered to be the oldest German trade union building; it is a cultural monument within the meaning of the Saarland Monument Protection Act.
history
The legal protection association for the mining population of the Bonn Upper Mining District was founded in June 1889 after a strike by miners in the Saar area. Triggered by a labor dispute in the Ruhr area , around 11,500 miners went on strike on May 23, 1889. The news of the strike on the Ruhr met a situation on the Saar in which, with the economy picking up since autumn 1887, wages stagnated, food prices rose, working hours were extended and the way to complain from the employer, the Prussian state , was increasingly curtailed. There had previously been no union organization for miners on the Saar, and the Social Democrats were hardly active in the Saar area. The first chairman of the legal protection association was the miner Nikolaus Warken , known as Eckstein . Warken had previously led miners' gatherings, which were often held in the open air and were often banned by the Prussian authorities. That is why the legal protection association, to which 20,000 miners belonged in August 1891, planned to build its own clubhouse in Bildstock, where the first gatherings of miners had taken place in the run-up to the maize strike.
The draft of the legal protection room came from the architect Heinrich Güth , who later planned numerous residential buildings in Saarbrücken. Nikolaus Kron, innkeeper and cashier in the legal protection association, made the property available. After the laying of the foundation stone in May 1891, an eight - axis two - storey brick building was built . On the ground floor there was a meeting room, which with a floor area of 480 square meters offered space for almost 1000 people. The slogan "One for All - All for One" was affixed to the facade. Each member should contribute to the construction costs of 50,000 to 60,000 marks through a donation of one mark and two bricks. At a time of disputes in the legal protection association about the relationship with social democracy and conflicts over the cash management, the construction of the legal protection hall was perceived by the members as an “overwhelming community experience” that stabilized the association. The wood miner Johann Meiser (1855–1918) described in his memoirs from 1911 how the bricks were transported to wayside shrine
"And so the pilgrims went or rather went on a pilgrimage in groups from each community, each loaded with two or four hard-burned bricks that they had tied together with the pick rope, smoking the corner stone pegs or singing liberation songs to the wayside shrine."
Several thousand miners and their families attended the inauguration ceremony on September 11, 1892. In the same month August Bebel gave a speech in the legal protection room; On June 1, 1893, the only SPD election campaign event in the Saar district for the 1893 Reichstag election took place in the building , at which Wilhelm Liebknecht spoke. The basement of the hall had already been used for printing the club organ mallets and iron since mid-1892 .
Mass layoffs during another strike from December 1892 led to the collapse of the legal protection association: On January 10, 1893, the Prussian mine management dismissed around 2500 miners, especially activists of the legal protection association. Continued employment was often made dependent on leaving the legal protection association; from January to June 1893 the number of members fell from 20,228 to 344. In the summer of 1893 the legal protection association ceased its activities and until its dissolution in August 1896 limited itself to the liquidation of the association's assets. In 1894 the legal protection room was sold to the Neunkirchen Castle Brewery ; In 1895 the Prussian Mining Treasury acquired the building and used it as an evening school for young miners, as a kindergarten, as a household school for miners' daughters and for residential purposes. With the purchase by the Bergfiskus, the “great strike period” from 1889 to 1893 came to a “symbolic end”; henceforth the building stood as a “memorial to the success and defeat of the miners' movement on a hill above the Sulzbachtal”, according to the historian Horst Steffens.
In 1985, the then Prime Minister of Saarland, Oskar Lafontaine , campaigned for the preservation of the legal protection room, the demolition of which had been considered at times. Previously owned by Saarbergwerke , the building became the property of the city of Friedrichsthal in 1989. The building has been owned by the Legal Protection Hall Foundation since mid-1995 . After extensive renovation work, the cost of which was partly borne by the state in the amount of three million DM , the legal protection room was reopened as an event location on September 11, 1996. The building is the starting point of the Warken-Eckstein-Weg , a hiking trail that leads from the wayside shrine to Hasborn , where Nikolaus Warkens lived.
literature
- Delf Slotta: Oldest German trade union building: The legal protection hall in Friedrichsthal-Bildstock. (= Landmark of Saar mining. Part 16) In: Bituminous coal. DSK group magazine. 9/2002. ( Landmarks of Saar mining (PDF) )
Web links
- Official homepage of the legal protection room
- Literature on the legal protection room in the Saarland Bibliography
- Gerd Meiser: The nucleus of the uproar. In: Saarbrücker Zeitung
Individual evidence
- ^ Slotta, union building.
- ↑ Sub-monument list Regionalverband Saarbrücken ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF 0.1 MB) at the State Monuments Office Saarland .
- ^ A b Rainer Slotta : Headframe and miner's house. From mining on the Saar. Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag, Saarbrücken 1979, ISBN 3-921646-18-9 , p. 97.
- ↑ This assessment by Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Horst Steffens: Lohn der Mühlen. History of the miners on the Saar. CH Beck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-33988-3 , p. 86.
- ↑ Karl Ludwig Jüngst: "I thank God for that too" Memoirs of the Holzer miner Johann Meiser. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Ed.): We were never really at home. Voyages of discovery in the Saar region 1815–1955. 2nd Edition. JHW Dietz Successor, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-8012-0124-4 , pp. 43-47, here p. 47.
- ↑ Mallmann, Steffens, Lohn , p. 92f.
- ↑ Mallmann, Steffens, Lohn , p. 94.
- ↑ Route 1 - Evidence of hard coal mining in the Saar coal forest ( Memento from November 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 49 ° 20 ′ 5 ″ N , 7 ° 6 ′ 1 ″ E