Willi Hoss

Willi Hoss (born April 27, 1929 in Vaals , Netherlands ; † February 20, 2003 in Stuttgart ) was a German trade unionist and politician ( KPD / DKP and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen ).

Life and professional activity

Hoss was born in the Netherlands, where his parents, the baker Wilhelm Lambert Hoss and his Dutch wife Katharina Emmen, moved during the Great Depression in 1928 and from where they returned to Oberhausen in 1937 .

Hoss ended his eight-year attendance at elementary school in 1943. After the end of the war, he worked as a farm laborer. He joined the KPD in 1945, for which he worked as a functionary in the early 1950s. After they were banned in 1956 and a six-week training course as a welder, he worked from 1956 in various companies in the Düsseldorf area and from October 1959 as a high-pressure welder at Daimler-Benz in Untertürkheim . Hoss entered the works council elections in the early 1970s with his own list ("poster group"). Thereupon he was expelled from IG Metall in 1972 because of “activities that were harmful to the union” . Thanks to the remarkable success of his list, Hoss was a member of the works council from 1972 and a member of the negotiating works committee from 1979.

Political party

As a member and functionary of the KPD, he attended a two-year course at the Karl Marx party college in Kleinmachnow near Berlin from 1949 to 1951 . After the ban by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956, the party continued to exist illegally. For Hoss, there was “no question that as a communist I belonged in the factory”. In order not to start as an unskilled worker, he first completed a welding course before doing covert party work as a worker in various companies, e.g. B. by producing and distributing leaflets in illegal company groups. After two layoffs in the Düsseldorf area, he applied to Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart, where he was hired as an electric welder in 1959. With a handful of “residual communists” in the company, he published an illegal KPD newspaper.

Although he was critical of the new founding of the DKP in 1968, which was tolerated by the politicians of the grand coalition - in his words a “bureaucratic birth” - he joined it. As a result of his criticism of the violent termination of the Prague Spring by Soviet troops, the party excluded him in 1970.

In 1979, Hoss was one of the founders of the Green Party . In 2001 he left the party with his wife Heidemarie Hoss-Rohweder because of their support for Germany's participation in the Afghanistan war .

Willi Hoss was a member and sponsor of the Socialist Youth of Germany - Die Falken in Baden-Württemberg.

MP

From 1983 to 1985 and from 1987 to 1990 he was a member of the German Bundestag for the Greens . Since he respected the party's rotation resolution, which he had rejected, he left the Bundestag in 1985 to return to his job at Daimler-Benz.

From January 15, 1990 until the end of the legislative period, he was one of the three speakers of the parliamentary group The Greens .

When the candidates were drawn up for the 1990 Bundestag election , he was not taken into account again due to internal preliminary agreements by the party leadership.

"Retirement"

From 1991 he worked for Indios in the Brazilian rainforest . He called the initiative “Poverty and Environment in Amazonia e. V. “into life. In 1994 he founded POEMA e. V. Stuttgart as a partner of POEMA Brasil. POEMA was awarded the Stuttgart Peace Prize 2008.

An important motto for him was Friedrich Hölderlin's sentence "But where there is danger, what can save also grows".

family

Grave of Willi Hoss and Heidemarie Rohweder in the forest cemetery in Stuttgart

Willi Hoss was married twice and had two children. The actress Nina Hoss is his daughter from his marriage to the actress and director Heidemarie Hoss-Rohweder .

His grave is in the forest cemetery in Stuttgart .

literature

• "Come into the open, friend". Autobiography. Edited by Peter Kammerer . Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 3rd corrected edition, Münster 2017, ISBN 978-3-89691-562-7 (first 2004).
• Heide Platen: Willi Hoss is dead ; Obituary in taz , issue from 22./23. February 2003.

Web links

• Literature by and about Willi Hoss in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Come into the open, friend , p. 36.
2. ↑ Come into the open, friend , p. 49.
3. ↑ Come into the open, friend , p. 69.
4. ↑ Come into the open, friend , p. 90.