Willy Kressmann

Willy Kressmann (1961)

Willy Kressmann (born October 6, 1907 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg , † March 5, 1986 in Berlin-Kreuzberg ) was a German politician ( SPD ). From 1949 to 1962 he was the district mayor of Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Life

youth

Willy Kressmann was born the son of a toolmaker and completed a typesetter apprenticeship after elementary school . As a student he joined the USPD , in 1922 the SPD and the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ). From 1930 Kressmann was a member of Erwin Piscator's opposition special departments at the Volksbühne Berlin . The 7th Reich Conference of the Young Socialists (April 5–6, 1931 in Leipzig) elected him to the Reich leadership. In the same year, 1931, the SPD excluded him from the party because he had accused the party leadership of weak leadership and a "petrified functional hierarchy". Kressmann now joined the SPD left-wing spin-off, SAPD . He was a member of the Reich leadership of the SAPD youth association SJVD and acted as editor of the organ of the youth association Der Jungprolet .

exile

In 1933 an arrest warrant was issued against him. Kressmann had openly called for resistance against the Schleicher government because it supported the NSDAP . Initially head of the illegal youth work of the SAPD, Kressmann had to emigrate in October 1933 after several brief arrests. He spent the years 1933 to 1947 in exile in Prague , Austria , Switzerland , Spain , Italy , Poland , Scandinavia and Great Britain (interned there from 1940 to 1941). There Kressmann sometimes used the code name Erich Wendland.

Berlin politician

In the early summer of 1947, Kressmann, who had meanwhile rejoined the SPD, returned to Berlin and became magistrate director in the economics department of Greater Berlin .

In February 1949 he was elected district mayor and city councilor for Berlin-Kreuzberg. In the same year he drew attention to himself when he took part in clearing roadblocks on the border between the Soviet occupation zone and West Berlin . Early on he tried to defuse the Cold War . In June 1955, he called for direct talks between the western and eastern district mayors of Berlin. In September he demanded that Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer should start negotiations on internal German relations with GDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl . Kressmann saw Berlin as a “bridge between East and West” and “did not want to let threads tear that, despite all the difficulties, still pull from one side to the other”.

Kressmann got involved with publicity campaigns against organized crime in the district and urged the police to fight it decisively, which was also successful.

With the votes of the SPD, he was voted out of Kreuzberg's district mayor in 1962, after describing the Berlin Wall at a press conference in New York as the "result of the politics of the East and the West" and the "use of weapons by both sides" had questioned. Because of the statements, party order proceedings were initiated against him at the same time. Berlin's governing mayor Willy Brandt (SPD) said before the Berlin House of Representatives that Kressmann's statements were “not in line with our policy”.

tomb

Kressmann bitterly resigned from the SPD in 1963. He moved to Weißach near Rottach-Egern am Tegernsee in Bavaria and only took up residence again in Berlin-Kreuzberg shortly before his death. He was given an honorary grave by the city of Berlin at the Zehlendorf forest cemetery in Berlin-Nikolassee .

Legends

Legends and true stories surround Kressmann. He was nicknamed Texas-Willy because he became an honorary citizen of San Antonio in the US state of Texas in 1958 . He was the first German politician to travel to the USA on an official invitation after the Second World War , brought a white Stetson with him and wore it in public.

When the foundation stone for today's town hall was laid in the 1950s , Mayor Kressmann welcomed the Governing Mayor Ernst Reuter (SPD). There are photos in which both shake hands. The news said: “Reuter promised to finance the new town hall building.” However, Reuter never did this. But because he didn't want to embarrass his comrades, he had to pay part of the construction costs.

To this day, Kressmann is the only district mayor of Berlin whose likeness graced the title of an issue of Spiegel magazine and was featured on the front page of the New York Times . At that time the word "Free Republic of Kreuzberg" was born, and Kreuzberg was popularly known as "Kressmannsdorf".

In the summer of 1951, Kressmann visited FDJ members who had been arrested in the context of street battles around the World Festival of Youth and Students in Kreuzberg and held for up to two weeks. One of those arrested later reported to the Groscurth committee set up to investigate the incidents that she had been insulted and slapped as a fascist by Kressmann. Kressmann had also put forward the thesis that the Hitler-Stalin pact had only served the two of them so that Germany attacked the Soviet Union “only temporarily”, “to clear the way for Stalin to advance to France”. The young woman's testimony caused a lot of laughter in the committee.

The women's magazine Sie published a survey in Berlin in 1952 about the most popular politician: Kressmann ranked after Ernst Reuter , Konrad Adenauer , Theodor Heuss , Louise Schroeder , Kurt Schumacher and Carlo Schmid , and even ahead of Franz Neumann , Ludwig Erhard , Otto Suhr , Paul Löbe , Franz Josef Strauss or Herbert Wehner in 7th place.

Kressmann was a Freemason and belonged to a lodge of the Great National Mother Lodge to the three globes . He was married four times, his third marriage to the architect and building contractor Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach and, until the end of his life, his fourth marriage to Brigitte Succar-Landsberg, née. Landsberg, daughter of the Berlin politician Kurt Landsberg .

The former Katzbachstadion on the southern side of the Kreuzberg Viktoriapark has had his name since 2010.

Fonts

• Thoughts on reunification from the perspective of a Berliner. In: trade union monthly books, 01/1960, pp. 5–8.
• Kreuzberg festive days [5.8. – 20.8.] 1961. Haupt & Puttkammer, Berlin 1961.

literature

• Werner Breunig, Siegfried Heimann , Andreas Herbst : Biographical Handbook of Berlin City Councilors and Members of Parliament 1946–1963 (=  series of publications by the Berlin State Archives . Volume 14 ). Landesarchiv Berlin , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-9803303-4-3 , p. 154 (331 pages).
• Siegfried Mielke (Ed.) With the collaboration of Marion Goers, Stefan Heinz , Matthias Oden, Sebastian Bödecker: Unique - Lecturers, students and representatives of the German University of Politics (1920-1933) in the resistance against National Socialism. Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 , pp. 242-247 (short biography).

Web links

• SPD Berlin - biography on archiv.spd-berlin.de
• Kressmann's curriculum vitae (PDF file; 51 KB) ( memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) on berlin.de
• Willy Brandt hated him , feature on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, September 25, 2019.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erwin Piscator: Letters. Volume 3.1: Federal Republic of Germany, 1951–1954 . Edited by Peter Diezel. B&S Siebenhaar, Berlin 2011. pp. 368, 588.
2. ^ Hanno Drechsler: The SAPD. A contribution to the history of the German labor movement at the end of the Weimar Republic . Erlangen 1971, pp. 74, 103, 164, 167.
3. ↑ Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop. An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86732-274-4 , short biography on p. 444f.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Berlin - Kressmann: Letters never arrived . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1955, pp. Cover , 12–19 ( online - July 6, 1955 , cover story, among other things, about Kressmann's invitations to East Berlin's district mayor to the Kreuzberg town hall for talks about the restoration of the infrastructure between the district borders of East and West Berlin).
5. ^ BStU: Tape from Stasi holdings HA IX Tb 3230 yellow.