Ulrich Ilg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ulrich Ilg in the 1960s

Ulrich Ilg (born April 7, 1905 in Dornbirn ; † May 9, 1986 ibid) was an Austrian politician ( ÖVP ) and the first governor of the state of Vorarlberg after the Second World War. Ilg is often referred to as the “father of today's Vorarlberg” because of his work on the basis of the regional structure.

Live and act

Ulrich Ilg was born on April 7, 1905 as the first child of Franz Josef and Magdalena Ilg (née Huber) in Dornbirn. Both parents of the Ilg family worked as farmers and lived in a Rhine Valley house in the then still rural district of Hatlerdorf . While the young Ulrich Ilg was attending elementary school in Dornbirn, the First World War broke out in 1914, and his father was drafted into the army. After the end of the war, Ilg enrolled in the first course in the newly established agricultural college in the Mehrerau in Bregenz in 1920 .

Between the wars and the corporate state

On May 15, 1927, Ilg was elected as chairman of the Vorarlberger Bauernbund as a 22-year-old who had previously been politically inexperienced . This was constituted on that very day at the 1st Farmers' Day and consisted of Christian-social and independent farmers. In 1934 Ilg was a provincial government for the first time a member of the Vorarlberg state government and the Christian Social Party to replace the deposed Socialist mandatary Anton Linder briefly by the Vorarlberg state parliament as a member of the Austrian Federal Council sent.

He was not supposed to hold the latter office for long - namely only one week from April 27 to May 2, 1934 - because at the age of 29 he was the youngest member of the cabinet of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in the same year as State Secretary for Land and Forestry was appointed. In his last and only Bundesratssitzung before provisional adoption of Vienna, on May 1, 1934, the day when it was May Constitution designated occupational Constitution decided that the time of the Austro-fascism abolished and the corporate state in Austria constitutionally embedded and hence the Federal Council as a legislative body. Ilg did not remain a member of the Dollfuss government for long either. From July 13th to August 3rd, 1934 he was officially State Secretary. After the July coup and the establishment of the new government under Kurt Schuschnigg , Ilg returned to Vorarlberg, where he initially held the office of Vice President of the Vorarlberg Chamber of Agriculture .

From 1934 to 1938, Ilg was employer representative for Vorarlberg in the Federal Economic Council , from which he was finally sent to the decision-making body of the Bundestag. When in 1936 the elections for the board of the peasant class were held for the first and last time in Vorarlberg due to the new constitution, Ulrich Ilg was elected by the regional farmers 'councils as regional farmers' leader.

During the interwar period, Ilg also faced some personal changes after his return to Vorarlberg. First, on January 8, 1936, Ilg's friend of the same age, Josef Vonbank , member of the state parliament from Braz, died unexpectedly . Here he met the young widow Vonbanks, who would later become his wife. First, however, Ilg's father died on February 21 of the same year. At the end of 1936, Ulrich Ilg finally got engaged to the widow of his deceased friend, Hilda, and also took in their son from their previous marriage. On September 6, 1937, Ulrich Ilg and Hilda Vonbank (née Hillbrand) finally married in the monastery church of the Mehrerau monastery . They were to become parents of six daughters and three sons. They also raised Josef Vonbank, who was named after his late father, together.

time of the nationalsocialism

When Wehrmacht troops marched into Vorarlberg on March 12, 1938 in order to " annex " Austria to the German Reich, Ulrich Ilg was summoned to Bregenz as chairman of the farmers 'association to hand over the office of the farmers' association to the newly appointed national socialist farmer leader Karl Jodok Troy . Ilg was subsequently called to the Dornbirn town hall to see security director Alfons Mäser, who told him that as an opponent of the Nazis, he was expected to make an atonement. According to his own statements, he did this in the form of a few sacks of potatoes. The Ilg family was spared further repression by the National Socialists. Ulrich Ilg himself, as a well-known opponent of the system, was described as “unworthy of military service” and was once called to Bregenz for a special sample. Ilg did not exercise any official functions during the time of National Socialist rule. He was only active in the diocesan church council in Innsbruck. In the last days of the war the “unworthy of defense” men of the country were obliged to work on entrenchments, including Ilg, who was assigned to cut rods in Schlins .

Post-war period and state committee

Just a few days after the end of the war, the former State Secretary for Agriculture and self-employed farmer Ilg campaigned for the farmers in Vorarlberg to be allowed to enlarge their cultivation areas to secure food for the civilian population. This request was finally granted by the French military government on May 6, 1945. Ulrich Ilg described in his memoirs the cooperation with the occupation authorities as very fruitful from the start. Ilg, on the other hand, was valued by the French as an influential figure of the pre-war period without any Nazi interference. Subsequently, he was brought into discussion by the Feldkirch lawyer Arthur Ender for the formation of a state government and at the same time put him in contact with the social democrat Jakob Bertsch . The two quickly came to an agreement on a government led by Ilg with five representatives of the People's Party and three socialists. After Ilg introduced this proposal to the military administration, all eight future Vorarlberg government representatives were ordered to Feldkirch on May 24, 1945, where the occupying power was based. In order to underline the provisional character of this unelected government, no state government with a state governor was set up, but a state committee with a president as chairman was appointed as the provisional supreme authority of Vorarlberg, subordinate to the military government. Ilg thus became President of the Vorarlberg State Committee , which performed both executive and legislative functions. Only after the first state election did the Vorarlberg state parliament and the Vorarlberg state government separate .

“My dear Vorarlberg residents!
A historically significant moment for our country has dawned. The independence of Vorarlberg, which was repealed by the National Socialists in 1938, has been restored. After shaking off the brown dictatorship and tyranny, a Vorarlberg regional committee has now been formed with the consent of the occupation authorities of our country. With the formation of the regional committee, Vorarlberg's self-government under the sovereignty of the French army has been restored.
[...] "

- Ulrich Ilg : Radio address from June 10, 1945

As governor in the state government

Ulrich Ilg participates
in government in the second republic
Vorarlberg State Committee
May 24 to December 11, 1945: President
State government Ilg I
1945–1949: Governor
State government Ilg II
1949–1954: Governor
State government Ilg III
1954–1959: Governor
State government Ilg IV
1959–1964: Governor
State government Keßler I 1964–1969: State
councilor for finance and building construction

On November 25, 1945, after the legal and constitutional questions had been clarified at a country conference in Vienna in September, a free state election was held in Vorarlberg for the first time since 1932 . At this, the ÖVP, led by Ulrich Ilg, was elected with over 70% of the votes and thus achieved 19 seats in the Vorarlberg state parliament, which contains a total of 26 members. The Socialist Party of Austria achieved 7 seats with 27.3% of the votes and the Communist Party of Austria failed to enter the state parliament. As a result, Ilg was both the parliament president and the governor selected. He then formed a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party, the state government Ilg I . In this first state government, the reconstruction and questions of feeding the population were of particular importance. Ilg himself was in charge of the Presidium, Police, and Agriculture and Forestry divisions.

After a severe election defeat by the People's Party at federal level in 1962, he resigned as governor in 1964. However, he did not withdraw from politics as usual, but voluntarily resigned to the second tier and stood by his successor Herbert Keßler in his state government Keßler I for four more years as a finance and building construction advisor in the state government. Ilg finally withdrew from state politics in 1969 with the inauguration of the newly elected state government Keßler II .

Awards

In Ilg's hometown of Dornbirn, Ulrich-Ilg-Straße in the Hatlerdorf district , where his home farm was also located, is a street named after him.

literature

Web links

Commons : Ulrich Ilg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Article about Ulrich Ilg in the Vorarlberg Chronik
  2. ^ Ulrich Ilg: My Memoirs . P. 34
  3. ^ Ulrich Ilg: My Memoirs . P. 40
  4. ^ Ulrich Ilg: My Memoirs . P. 53
  5. ↑ Ulrich Nachbaur : Vorarlberger Landesregierungen since 1945. (PDF; 158 kB) Vorarlberger Landesarchiv , January 1, 2005, accessed on May 20, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Ulrich Nachbaur : Red and white blows through the air - On the tradition of Vorarlberg regional symbols (PDF; 35 kB) . Lecture in the Vorarlberg State Archives on March 17, 2004.
personal data
SURNAME Ilg, Ulrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian politician (CS, ÖVP), Governor of Vorarlberg, member of the Federal Council
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Dornbirn
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1986
Place of death Dornbirn