Willy Boepple

Willy Boepple (actually Rudolf Boepple , born July 9, 1911 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein ; † September 22, 1992 in Weinheim ) was a German KPD politician .

Life

After attending secondary school, Boepple, who came from a social democratic working-class family, did an apprenticeship in the hotel and restaurant trade. In 1931 he joined the KPD and the Red Aid . At the beginning of 1933 Boepple formally resigned from the KPD, as the local party leadership had intended him to be smuggled into the NSDAP and the SS as a “mole” . In March 1933, at the beginning of the National Socialist regime , he was arrested and was imprisoned in the Mannheim remand prison , in the Heuberg concentration camp and in the Kislau concentration camp until the end of 1933 . After his dismissal, Boepple worked again in the hospitality industry . During this time, he obtained a hotel management diploma at a hotel management school. In 1940 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . He remained a soldier until he deserted in the spring of 1945.

Immediately after the end of the war, he rejoined the KPD. In the first post-war years , Boepple , who was in close contact with the critical KPD politicians Georg Kenzler and Jakob Ritter , was the intellectual spokesman for the southwest German communists because of his knowledge of Marxist theory. In 1945 he was one of the founders of the Mannheim party . During this time he worked as a senior editor for the cultural section of the (bourgeois) Badische Neuesten Nachrichten . In 1946 Boepple became a communist member of the state parliament in the state parliament of Württemberg-Baden . He became vice chairman of the parliamentary group, as successor to Paul Schreck district chairman for North Baden and some time later second state chairman of the party. As a delegate of the KPD, Willy Boepple belonged to the presidium of the unification party congress of April 21 and 22, 1946 and was elected to the SED party executive after the compulsory union of the SPD and KPD to form the SED

Since 1947 he increasingly criticized the politics of the SED. In 1948 he did not accept Walter Ulbricht's criticism of the policies of the SED / KPD. Boepple's statement that it was difficult to teach the German people about Stalin's policy led to a scandal. Thereupon he resigned his mandate and party functions. Boepple resigned from the KPD in 1949, because he believed that a communist had no place in this party.

In the following years he initially worked in the KPO's successor organization Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik and took part in preparations for the establishment of the UAPD as the third workers' party alongside the KPD and SPD , but later withdrew from it and instead joined the Trotskyist Fourth International or theirs German section IKD , of which he was a leading member in the following two decades together with Georg Jungclas . As part of the Fourth International's entry line , he also joined the SPD in 1953. He belonged to the party until 1966. There Boepple was on the left wing and was editor and editor of the magazine " Sozialistische Politik " from 1954 to 1964. After the division of the section in 1969, he initially belonged to the group of International Marxists (GIM), which he, after a conflict with the section majority, a . a. left at the end of 1972 due to his skepticism about youth radicalization after 1968. From 1977 he translated a number of Trotskyist texts from English and French, such as Ernest Mandel's Introduction to Marxism and Michael Löwy's study of Che Guevara , into German, and from the early 1980s he began to work more closely with the GIM on a practical level to work together. After the end of the GDR, Boepple supported initiatives for the rehabilitation of communist victims of Stalinism . In 1991 he joined the VSP .

Fonts

• Wolfgang Alles (Ed.): Against the current. Texts by Willy Boepple (1911-1992) . Neuer ISP-Verlag, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-929008-77-7 .

Web links

• Willy Boepple in the memorial book of the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg
• Literature by and about Willy Boepple in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Kroll: Communist intellectuals in western Germany (1945-1956). A study of the history of faith from a comparative perspective. In: History and Society Issue 2 2007 p. 271
2. ↑ Minutes of the unification congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on April 21 and 22, 1946 in the State Opera "Admiralspalast" in Berlin. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. Berlin, 1946 PDF