Werner Bowing

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Werner Böwing (born October 15, 1928 in Güldengossa ; † August 28, 2016 in Solingen ), socialist and pacifist , was the former managing director of the IG Bau-Steine-Erden trade union in Solingen and co-founder and long-term board member of the Association of Conscientious Objectors (VK).

Life

Werner Böwing and spent his childhood and school days, due to the frequently changing places of work of his father, in several places between Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein before the family settled in Retzow near Templin in 1938 .

After attending elementary school, Böwing began training as a carpenter in 1943. In July 1944 he volunteered for military service, was obliged to do the Reich Labor Service and in March 1945 he was still on the front in Lower Saxony. He became a British prisoner of war and was interned in camps in Scotland and England until June 1948.

After his release from captivity, Böwing returned to his parents, who lived in the Soviet occupation zone . He continued his training as a carpenter and became a member of the FDJ , but soon found himself in opposition to the organization's official policy. When he and a few friends from the RIAS heard about the F-Action of the Combat Group Against Inhumanity , in which the letter F was secretly painted on the walls of houses in the Soviet Zone as a symbol for the words freedom and enmity , they also adapted this action for their hometown Lychen . In order to avoid the persecution by the People's Police that began afterwards , Böwing fled to West Berlin at the beginning of September 1949 , where he joined the Falken and completed his training on February 27, 1950 with the journeyman's examination.

After his journeyman's examination, Böwing moved to Bonn, where he was also involved with the falcons and the Jusos, and in October 1951 married Maria Kirchner, a comrade in Bad Godesberg . In the fall of 1954, both became members of the group of opponents of military service (GdW), which became involved in the course of rearmament against military service . Since 1950 he was a trade union and SPD member.

After attending the Academy of Labor , Böwing's full-time trade union career began in 1956 at IG Bau-Steine-Erden (IG Bau). In 1958 he was defeated by Johannes Rau in the election of Wuppertal Juso chairman and in the same year was elected to the federal board of the newly founded UK.

In May 1958 he was elected managing director of IG Bau-Steine-Erden for the first time in Solingen and continued to be involved in the protest movements of the time. He belonged to the Wuppertal working group on the fight against atomic death and in April 1958 was one of the signatories of a protest event organized by this working group with the speakers Stefan Andres , Johannes Rau and Renate Riemeck . After the DGB and SPD withdrew from this movement, Böwing became involved in the Easter march movement that was being formed and in 1960 took part in the Easter march from Hamburg to Bergen-Hohne . In May of this year he was elected deputy federal chairman at the Detmold Federal Congress of the UK. From then on he was a member of the federal executive committee for eight years. In 1968 he decided not to participate in this body at the Bremen Federal Congress. Böwing justified this with the fact that, in his opinion, the “student movement began to infiltrate the UK for its own purposes, to politicize it ideologically, without any further commitment to the practical aid work that had often taken place behind the scenes”. “I noticed that federal board members were turning more and more to the new line. One did not want to miss the 'revolutionary train'. Other federal board members resigned and withdrew discreetly. I too had doubts whether the new people might not bring in something that we had previously lacked. On the other hand, that wasn't my thing, but I didn't want to go down in UK history as a 'brakeman' either. And I didn't want to get angry about 'this' VK either. I was no longer running for the national board. ”Werner Böwing's departure from the UK national board was not a farewell to the extra-parliamentary opposition. He continued to work against the emergency laws, in the Easter march movement and in the later peace movement .

Böwing was "also active at the international level [...] for the peace movement and against nuclear armament". He gave a lecture at a peace policy seminar in Jutland in the autumn of 1962 , belonged to a UK delegation at the anti-atomic march on Brussels in the spring of 1963 and attended this Belgian event again a year later. On January 11, 1964, in Tyringe, Sweden, he took part in the founding congress of the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace (ICDP), which was initiated by western and non-aligned groups , and he was elected to the council in August 1966. In October of the same year he was the ICDP representative at the World Congress of the Pax Christi Movement in Bergamo, and in November 1966 he was again a speaker on the Federal Republic and democracy in Aarhus and Copenhagen .

Böwing also developed international activities as a trade unionist and maintained contacts with the CSSR and the Yugoslav construction workers' union . After the military coup in Chile , he organized a solidarity campaign for those persecuted by the military regime that lasted more than twenty years with the Solingen IG Bau, through which 80 people could be given permanent aid.

In October 1987 Böwing ended his full-time trade union activity, his political commitment continued. In the same month he and his wife Maria participate in a sit-in in front of a barracks in Geilenkirchen . In 1992, together with Hanne and Klaus Vack and other members of the European peace movement, he visited the Adriatic island of Vis, which was occupied by the Serbian military . The aim of the trip was to support a local mayor and the island population in their efforts to “give their island a neutral, demilitarized status”. The holding of a conference on site failed because it had been banned by the second island mayor in association with the Croatian mainland authorities.

Böwing was also involved in helping Nicaragua and visited this country in the spring of 1993. Christian Fischer summed up his political commitment: “Werner Böwing did not hold any political office. He helped people full-time, part-time and privately, built and maintained networks, enabled encounters and educational work, activated political and professional mandate holders, sometimes with and sometimes without success. He appreciated the fact that in our democracy it is possible to fight for a decent life and for fairer conditions, even if there is no guarantee of success. "

Werner Böwing was often at odds with his trade union, but even more so with the SPD. In 1962 he came into conflict with the Solingen party twice, on the one hand because he refused to sign an election leaflet directed against the German Peace Union , and again because in the autumn he questioned “whether I was the SPD could choose this time ”. This led to a party order procedure and a complaint. Previously, he had a tricky party exclusion process because of his membership in the Sozialistische Fördergesellschaft e. V. , which supported the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), which had been excluded from the SPD . “In order not to be excluded from the SPD, I ended my membership in the Socialist Support Society. Maria joined this society at the same time, so that our modest contribution to the Socialist German Student Union could continue. "

At the beginning of the 2000s Werner Böwing left the SPD after he had "cut himself off from the party and voted for the Greens in recent years". When asked about the reasons, he said: “The NATO air strikes on Belgrade and the Scharping declaration on“ collateral damage ”. And no protest about it! The only protest was when the Chinese embassy was hit. But not against everything that went against the civilian population! "

Böwing was one of the founders of the WASG in Solingen , through which he then became a member of the Die Linke party . From 2007 he was a member of their council of elders, and in 2014, at the age of 85, he was one of the oldest Solingen council candidates for the local elections on May 25th.

Honors

Works

  • Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , self-published Solinger Geschichtswerkstatt eV, Solingen 1997, ISBN 3-9805443-2-X .
  • From someone who didn't make a career. Contemporary history and satirical contributions , Karl Liebknecht working group, Frankfurt am Main 2002.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless other sources are named, the following presentation of the timetable in the appendix to Böwing's book Memories of the Attempt to Change the Wind Direction with an Air Pump , pp. 353–361
  2. ↑ Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , p. 95
  3. ↑ Werner Böwing: "Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump", p. 152
  4. ↑ a b c Christian Fischer: The Importance of Personality in Public Engagement , Part 5 of the series Direct Democracy in Germany , Time-Issues Cooperative, Zurich 2020.
  5. ↑ Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , p. 188
  6. ↑ There seem to be only documents in the archive of Neune Deutschland about the anti-atomic march in Brussels .
  7. ↑ See the article in the English language Wikipedia: ICDP
  8. ↑ Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , p. 290
  9. ↑ Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , pp. 245–248
  10. ↑ For its wording see: Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , p. 308
  11. ↑ Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , p. 357
  12. ↑ Werner Böwing: Memories of the attempt to change the wind direction with an air pump , p. 309
  13. ↑ a b He can't help it . Conversation between Stefan Richter and Werner Böwing on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2008
  14. ^ Two Generations at One Table , RP Online, May 15, 2014
  15. ↑ Wolfgang P. Getta: Federal Cross of Merit Werner Böwing is dead , Solinger Tageblatt, September 2, 2016. The date of the award is not known.
  16. ↑ Bernd Bussang: Two against poverty and violence , RP Online, May 15, 2012
  17. ^ Reference in the catalog of the German National Library
personal data
SURNAME Bowing, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trade unionist, socialist and pacifist
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Güldengossa
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 2016
Place of death Solingen