Walther Bacmeister (publisher)

Walther Bacmeister (also: Walter, born April 30, 1877 in Eisenach ; † December 14, 1953 in Essen ) was a German journalist and publisher and a member of the Prussian House of Representatives .

Live and act

Coming from the well-known Bacmeister family in Lower Saxony , the son of the publishing bookseller Johann Bacmeister (1841-1918) and the writer, painter and teacher Lucie Juliane Müller and brother of the writer Ernst Bacmeister grew up in a large family, which was often due to the fact that the father moved several times had to move.

Characterized by his family situation, Bacmeister took up a position as a journalist at the Essen Generalanzeiger from 1897 after school and training . At the same time, however, he also began to be politically active and was elected manager of the United National Parties in Essen from 1900 to 1904 , which consisted mainly of the National Liberal Party and local groups of other right-wing conservative parties.

In addition to his professional commitments and political activities, Bacmeister was a skilled soccer player in those years. As such, he was one of the founding members of Essener SV 1899 in 1899 , headed this club as first chairman until 1904 and was also the captain of the first team. Under his leadership, ESV 1899, to which his brother, Gustav Bacmeister (1876–1957) also belonged as a player and functionary, soon became one of the strongest West German clubs. As early as 1902/03 they reached the final round of the first West German Championship and finished second behind VfL Cologne in 1899 .

In 1904 Bacmeister followed a call to Elberfeld , where the Bergisch-Märkische Zeitung took him over as editor-in-chief and publisher. Bacmeister continued this activity until 1930 and, after they left, also took over as editor and editor of the weekly magazine for German world and colonial policy Das große Deutschland , published by Ernst Jäckh and Paul Rohrbach , which appeared from 1916 under the title German Politics . In this medium, Bacmeister drew attention to himself primarily with several articles on German expansion and colonial policy. During his time in Elberfeld, he also intensified his political activity and was elected to the Prussian House of Representatives from 1913 to 1918 as a representative of the National Liberal Party. After it was to be expected that the National Liberal Party threatened to gradually disintegrate due to internal party disputes, he joined the German Fatherland Party from 1918 , for which he already on September 2, 1917 in Kiel at one of their founding meetings with a brilliant speech as a " fanatical Pan-German and ardent annexationist ”appeared.

In 1930 he moved to Berlin, where he founded his own publishing house, the Bacmeister-Nationalverlag . Here it was especially the publications of the National Socialist authors Franz Walther Ilges and Hermann Schmid that he edited. With a foreword by Bacmeister appeared in his publishing house by these authors among others: The planned division of Germany. High treason by the Center and the Bavarian People's Party 1918–1933 - Revelations about the Franco-Bavarian plans to divide up the German Empire and establish a Union of Danube States (1933) and high treason by the Center on the Rhine - New documents about the true leaders of the separatists (1934). Together with Herman Schmid, Bacmeister wrote the book he published in 1932: The Alcohol King and Prelate or Spritschiebungen, Fluchtkapital und Zentrum .

During this time, Bacmeister and his publisher were assigned an ever closer connection to the British politician Sir Oswald Mosley , who was best known as the founder of the fascist party British Union of Fascists (BUF). In 1934, Bacmeister had signed a contract to publish Mosley's works and political writings translated by Emil Otto Wilhelm Charlet for the German market.

For reasons that had not been clarified, Bacmeister relocated his publishing house to his old place of work in Essen in 1935, where in the following years he focused on the mining and industrial history of the Ruhr area and some of its important people, as well as regularly editing the Rhineland-Westphalian archive . During the Second World War , Bacmeister was forced to move his publishing house again and moved it to Potsdam in 1943, but returned to Essen in 1948, where he now worked as Bacmeister-Verlag Essen-Rüttenscheid with his biographical and historical publications until his death continued in 1953.

Works (selection)

• [together with Hermann Schmid] The Alcohol King and Prelate or: Fuel pushing, escape capital and center along with the photographed documents. Berlin, AGV Verlag / Richard Pape, 1932.
• Emil Kirdorf : The man - his work , Bacmeister-Nationalverlag, Essen-Rüttenscheid, 1936
• Louis Baare : A Westphalian business leader from d. Bismarck time , Bacmeister-Nationalverlag, Essen-Rüttenscheid, 1937
• Friedrich Harkort in his unknown poems, in unpublished letters and documents , Bacmeister-Nationalverlag, Essen-Rüttenscheid, 1937
• Hugo Schultz : The life picture of a great Ruhr miner , Bacmeister-Nationalverlag, Essen-Rüttenscheid, 1938
• Necrologist from the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area. Born 1937–1938, Essen publishing house, Essen 1940.
• Gustav Knepper : The life picture of a great miner , Bacmeister-Verlag, Essen-Rüttenscheid 1950.

literature

• Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 1: A-K. German business publisher, Berlin 1930, DNB 453960286 .

Web links

• Short message in the central database of the Federal Archives
• Short biography on p. 83 as well as political quotes by Bacmeister (PDF; 166 kB)
• Short biography in "Essen from A to Z"

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The life data are taken both from the genealogical-biographical family chronicle [1] and from the short biography in the article "Essen from A to Z", page 28 [2] . The life data given in the central database of the German Federal Archives erroneously refer to a relative of the same name from Württemberg, the Stuttgart senior public prosecutor and renowned hobby ornithologist Walther Bacmeister (1873–1966), son of the Oberkirchenrat Karl Albert Wilhelm Bacmeister
2. ↑ Bacmeister's work in the Essen sports club 1899 (PDF; 2 MB)
3. ↑ Bacmeister as editor and editor, section no .: 51333 and 50014 (PDF; 700 kB)
4. ↑ List of articles in the Bibliothèque de Lyon
5. ↑ Info on page 463, list of speakers
6. ^ Dirk Steger: The German Fatherland Party in Schleswig-Holstein 1917–1918; Mention of Bacmeister on page 54 (PDF; 1.2 MB)
7. ↑ Article about Emil Otto Wilhelm Charlet and his collaboration with Bacmeister  ( 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.