Wilhelm Kolb

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Wilhelm Kolb (born August 21, 1870 in Karlsruhe , † April 18, 1918 there ) was a German social democratic politician. He was a leading social democrat in Karlsruhe and an exponent of a reformist course. As the parliamentary group leader of his party in the second chamber of the Baden state assembly , he entered into an alliance ( large bloc ) with democrats and national liberals . This policy was sharply rejected by the party as a whole.

Kolb in the circle of leading Social Democrats in Baden, probably taken in 1906 in front of the old state hall in Offenburg . Sitting from right: Emil Eichhorn , Ludwig Frank , Wilhelm Kolb, Georg Monsch . Standing, first from the right: Adolf Geck. The other people are not known.

Family and early years

He was the son of the shoemaker Johann Wilhelm Kolb and his mother Christiane. He himself married Sofi Regina Faßbind in 1894. There were no children from the marriage.

After school he learned to be a painter . As a journeyman, he wandered through southern Germany and Switzerland.

Karlsruhe SPD and local politics

He was a Social Democrat and lost his job because of his demeanor. In the 1890s he rose to become a leading figure in the Karlsruhe SPD. Since 1894 he was a travel agent for the social democratic newspaper Volksfreund. He successfully campaigned for the editorial office to be relocated to Karlsruhe. When this happened in 1899, Kolb became a member of the editorial team. He was initially responsible for the Karlsruhe local section. He supported the editor-in-chief Anton Fendrich in his change of course in the orientation of the paper that the position of the revisionist Eduard Bernstein represented.

For the SPD, he was a member of the citizens' committee in Karlsruhe since 1899 . In 1908 he became one of the first social democratic city ​​councilors (roughly equivalent to the magistrate in other countries) in Karlsruhe. Even when he took on political tasks at the state level, he was intensively involved in various committees and advisory boards in local political work.

Reformist positions

Even at this time, Kolb was reformist. In 1897, he had made a significant contribution to the SPD entering into an alliance with the Democrats at the local level. The request by Geck and the state chairman Johann Friedrich Haug to dismiss the exponents of the reformist currents in Volksfreund as editors failed at the state party conference. At the nationwide party congress in 1900, Adolf Geck , also from Baden, attacked him because of the alliance policy. However, the dispute within Baden had no further effects. Kolb also made himself vulnerable because he demanded that "superfluous ballast" be removed from the party program. Because he also included the demand for women's suffrage , he was sharply criticized by August Bebel at the 1901 party congress in Lübeck . Bebel's attempt at the Baden state party congress to achieve a majority against the reformist party leadership around Kolb, Fendrich and August Dreesbach also failed. Kolb was not intimidated by Bebel's attacks, but appeared at the Dresden party congress in 1903 when all attempts to cast doubt on the pure Marxist doctrine met with the sharpest criticism, as a defender of a changed policy. He did not skimp on attacks on Bebel himself. He said it was irrelevant for practical work, "whether we want to accept Kautsky's theory of collapse or Bernstein's theory of development." He tried to prove that the new theoretical impulses could be reconciled with party tradition . His very far-reaching positions meant that, as the editor in charge of Volksfreund's meanwhile, he had to promise to edit the paper in the spirit of the party line in the future. However, this did not have any further negative effects on his position in the state party.

Although Eduard Bernstein's revisionism failed at the Dresden party congress in 1903, it was not least Kolb who ensured that the party in Karlsruhe changed from a fundamental opposition to a force for social reform. Kolb did not believe in a rapid collapse of capitalism , rather he saw social change as a slow process. He saw a mere policy of negation and denial that was limited to criticizing the system as a mistake. Instead, he focused on gradually improving the situation of the workers.

Big bloc politics

In 1903 Kolb was elected to the second chamber of the Baden state estates. Since 1905 he was parliamentary group leader of his party. Along with Georg von Vollmar from Bavaria, Kolb was an exponent of a markedly reformist course. Together with like-minded Ludwig Frank , he advocated collaboration with the Democrats and National Liberals (large bloc politics) in order to prevent the Center Party from dominating . The runoff agreement agreed with the other two parties meant that the number of Social Democratic MPs grew from six to thirteen.

In the following years there was great mistrust between the bourgeois parties and the SPD and there was only a few substantive cooperation. In 1909 the party won 20 seats in the state elections and the SPD became the second largest parliamentary group after the center. Again there was a runoff agreement with the Liberals. Now there was also a substantive collaboration. With the support of the SPD, far-reaching reforms in the school system, in tax policy and in the municipal code were adopted. Under his leadership, his parliamentary group approved the state budget of 1908 and 1910.

How little shy Kolb and Frank towards the state and the monarchy, had appeared in 1907 as they attend the funeral of Grand Duke Friedrich I participated. The party as a whole saw this as a provocation and a departure from the Marxist party line.

However, opposition groups formed against the reformist course in the party. In 1913 the party lost in the state elections and the big bloc broke up, especially on questions of imperial politics.

Internal party criticism

The Baden course met with sharp criticism from leading social democratic politicians in the Reich. Kolb and Frank were even threatened with expulsion from the party. Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg were among the harshest critics . Kolb defended his course at the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1908. He said that one had to adapt the tactics to the realities and that these looked different than Karl Kautsky imagined in his study. In particular, the party congress sharply condemned the budget approval. According to this, every opposing government was to be denied the state budget in the overall vote, unless the denial would result in the adoption of a budget that was less favorable for the working class. 66 delegates, especially from southern Germany, declared that the party congress was the highest authority for decisions across the empire. In all special state affairs, the state organization is the appropriate and competent authority to independently determine the course of state politics. The respective decision on budget coordination must be left to the dutiful discretion of the parliamentary group responsible for their state organization. This criticism intensified again in 1910 because Ludwig Frank and Wilhelm Kaub saw this step as a demonstrative act in the direction of their own party. They saw it as a counterpoint to the mass strike debate . Its course was approved by other southern German state associations, but was rejected by the Magdeburg party congress and any further budget approval threatened with exclusion from the party.

First World War

The approval of the war credits at the beginning of the First World War was understood in the Baden social democracy as the swinging of the entire party on its course. The Karlsruher Volksfreund took a strongly nationally oriented position. The SPD parliamentary group under Kolb and Ludwig Marum initially adhered to the truce policy . During the war, Kolb was inspector of the municipal estate administration in Karlsruhe and, as such, tried to improve the food supply during the emergency years of the war. In 1915 he demanded that the SPD finally "grow beyond the framework of the mere workers' party in order to become a people's party in the best sense of the word."

But the truce policy in Baden was also controversial and the USPD split off there in 1917 . Against this background, the parliamentary group changed course. Kolb now supported the peace resolution of the Reichstag, he terminated the truce by calling for further democratic reforms in Baden as well. These demands were rejected by the government.

After a serious illness, he died in 1918 before the revolution broke out.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Frank Engehausen: The beginnings of the social democrats in the Baden state parliament 1891–1904: On the prehistory of the large bloc. Lecture manuscript
  2. Frank Engehausen: The social democratic parliamentary group in the Wilhelmian Empire. Age structure and generation conflicts. In: Generations in the Labor Movement Munich, 2005 p. 145
  3. ^ Frank Engehausen: The beginnings of the social democrats in the Baden state parliament 1891–1904: On the prehistory of the large bloc. Lecture manuscript
  4. ^ Frank Engehausen: The beginnings of the social democrats in the Baden state parliament 1891–1904: On the prehistory of the large bloc. Lecture manuscript
  5. Andreas Hunkel: Eduard Dietz (1866–1940): judge, lawyer and constitutional creator. Frankfurt am Main, 2009 p. 52
  6. ^ Report on the 1908 party congress
  7. ^ Axel Kuhn: The German labor movement. Stuttgart, 2004 p. 124f.
  8. Max Bloch: "We have to get out of the tower!" The path of the SPD to the People's Party 1907–1959. Bonn, 2011 p. 21

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