Robert Dißmann

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Robert Dißmann

Robert Dißmann (born  August 8, 1878 in Hülsenbusch , †  October 30, 1926 on the Columbus in the Atlantic) was a union official, politician and co-founder of the USPD .

Life

The trained mechanical engineer Dißmann had been a member of the SPD and the German Metalworkers' Association since 1897. From 1900 to 1908 Robert Dißmann, who was considered an effective organizer, was the full-time manager of the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV), first for Elberfeld-Barmen , then for Frankfurt am Main . From 1908 to 1912 he was party secretary in Hanau , then until 1917 in Frankfurt. In 1913 he ran at the SPD party congress as a representative of the left party for the executive committee, but was narrowly defeated.

He stood against the attitude of the SPD leadership in the First World War and the majority of the party in opposition to the approval of war credits and the truce policy . In 1917 he founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) with others and was its district secretary in Frankfurt until 1919. From October 1919 he was elected one of three chairmen of the DMV with equal rights (alongside Alwin Brandes from the USPD and Georg Reichel from the SPD).

The election of Dißmann and his colleague Alwin Brandes to the DMV board was a sign of a left turn within the association, in which the USPD parliamentary group took over power. The background to this was the disputes over the truce policy during the First World War, which the DMV initially fully supported. During the war, however, a strong opposition movement formed in the metalworkers' union, which formed the majority after the November Revolution. The biggest critics of the truce policy were, on the one hand, Dißmann, and, on the other, Richard Müller , the head of the Berlin lathe operator . While Müller and his supporters called for the association to orientate themselves towards council socialism and in 1919 were able to enforce a commitment by the DMV to the council system , Dißmann wanted to build on the class struggle tradition of pre-war social democracy and later developed into a decided opponent of the council system.

He was able to get his way with this policy, the faction of the Council Socialists was pushed back, Richard Müller was removed from his position as editor of the DMV association newspaper. With the collapse of the USPD in 1920, Müller and the Council Socialists became involved in the KPD and built up a Communist faction within the DMV; Dißmann remained in the rest of the USPD and returned with it in 1922 to the SPD, where he was one of the leading representatives of the left Party wing was. In contrast to the USPD, however, the association did not split up in the DMV.

In 1920 Dißmann was elected to the Reichstag , to which he belonged until his death. Dißmann died of heart failure on the Atlantic ship Columbus in 1926 on his way back from Detroit , where he had attended an international metalworkers' congress.

Honors

In Frankfurt-Sossenheim a street and the surrounding settlement are named after Robert Dißmann.

literature

  • Chaja Boebel, Lothar Wentzel (Hrsg.): Strikes against the war - The meaning of the mass strikes in the metal industry of January 1918 . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-89965-320-5 .
  • Joachim Hoffmann, Günter Simon: Left union leader and independent social democrat: Robert Dißmann (1878-1926) . In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement 41 (1999), 4, pp. 106–121.
  • Ralf Hoffrogge : Richard Müller - The man behind the November Revolution . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02148-1 .
  • Ernst Stock, Karl Walcher: Jacob Walcher (1887–1970): trade unionist and revolutionary between Berlin, Paris and New York . Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89626-144-4 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ See Ralf Hoffrogge, Richard Müller - The Man Behind the November Revolution Berlin 2008, pp. 126f, 130, 134ff.
personal data
SURNAME Dißmann, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trade union official, politician (SPD, USPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Pod bush
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 1926
Place of death Atlantic