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Otto Braun
Otto Braun (28 January 1872 – 15 December 1955) was a politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. From 1920 to 1932, with only two brief interruptions, Braun was Minister President of the Free State of Prussia. The continuity of personnel in high office resulted in a largely stable government in Prussia, in contrast to the sometimes turbulent politics of the Reich. During his term of office, Prussia's public administration was reorganized along democratic lines. He replaced many monarchist officials with supporters of the Weimar Republic, strengthened and democratized the Prussian police, and made attempts to fight the rise of the Nazi Party.
On 20 July 1932, in the Prussian coup d'état (Preußenschlag), Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen ousted Braun's government from power following its loss of a parliamentary majority to the Nazis and the Communist Party of Germany. After Adolf Hitler seized power at the end of January 1933, Prussia lost its democratic constitution and Braun went into exile. After World War II, he had little or no political influence and was largely forgotten by the time he died in 1955.
Braun was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the capital and largest city of East Prussia. His father was originally a self-employed master shoemaker who ended his working life as a railroad lineman, a position then considered considerably lower socially. After a short period of schooling, Otto completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer.
Little information survives about his wife Emilie, née Podzius, who was one year older than Braun. He met her in the 1890s at a party function where he spoke, and they were married on 3 April 1894. During Braun's time as Minister President, Emilie never appeared in public. After she became terminally ill in 1927, the couple's life was largely confined to the house. According to eyewitness accounts, Braun cared for his wife devotedly; his flight to Switzerland in 1933 appears to have been primarily out of concern for her.[citation needed] Their only child, Erich, died of diphtheria in 1915 at the age of 21 as a volunteer in World War I. It was a loss that affected Braun deeply.
He was an impressive figure: almost 1.9 meters tall (6 ft. 2 in.), broadly built, strong-willed, with a marked organizational talent and an ability to lead even complex groups. He thought and acted in a matter-of-fact, sober manner but lacked both rhetorical skill and the ability to excite his listeners with a rousing speech. His political pragmatism was always guided by a deep humanist conviction of people's right to freedom and political equality.
In 1888, at the age of 16, Braun became involved with the SPD, which had been banned under the Anti-Socialist Laws of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Influenced by anarcho-syndicalism[citation needed] – a view that revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism was a way for workers to gain control of a capitalist economy – he initially belonged to the party's left wing. He was chairman of the Königsberg Workers' Election Association, the local party's legal front, and later producer, editor and printer of various Social Democratic periodicals. In a region where several attempts by the SPD to establish a party newspaper had failed, Braun successfully founded the Volkstribüne, later the Königsberger Volkszeitung, with no start-up capital, minimal support from party leadership and under difficult sales conditions in a rural area dominated by large-scale agriculture.
During the period he was particularly involved with the agricultural workers of East Prussia, and as a result he became an expert on agricultural policy within the SPD as well as a lifelong opponent of the landed Junkers of East Elbia, the area of Germany to the east of the Elbe river. In a later work, Das ostelbische Landproletariat ('The East Elbian Rural Proletariat'), he wrote in his unwieldy prose:
The exploited, disenfranchised East Elbian rural population is the pedestal on which the preponderant share of the power of the East Elbian Junkers rests and, propped on it, drives the policies of robbery that starve and disenfranchise the people. But the more the pedestal succeeds in spreading Social Democratic principles among the population groups that form it, the more rotten it must become.
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Otto Braun
Otto Braun (28 January 1872 – 15 December 1955) was a politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. From 1920 to 1932, with only two brief interruptions, Braun was Minister President of the Free State of Prussia. The continuity of personnel in high office resulted in a largely stable government in Prussia, in contrast to the sometimes turbulent politics of the Reich. During his term of office, Prussia's public administration was reorganized along democratic lines. He replaced many monarchist officials with supporters of the Weimar Republic, strengthened and democratized the Prussian police, and made attempts to fight the rise of the Nazi Party.
On 20 July 1932, in the Prussian coup d'état (Preußenschlag), Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen ousted Braun's government from power following its loss of a parliamentary majority to the Nazis and the Communist Party of Germany. After Adolf Hitler seized power at the end of January 1933, Prussia lost its democratic constitution and Braun went into exile. After World War II, he had little or no political influence and was largely forgotten by the time he died in 1955.
Braun was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the capital and largest city of East Prussia. His father was originally a self-employed master shoemaker who ended his working life as a railroad lineman, a position then considered considerably lower socially. After a short period of schooling, Otto completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer.
Little information survives about his wife Emilie, née Podzius, who was one year older than Braun. He met her in the 1890s at a party function where he spoke, and they were married on 3 April 1894. During Braun's time as Minister President, Emilie never appeared in public. After she became terminally ill in 1927, the couple's life was largely confined to the house. According to eyewitness accounts, Braun cared for his wife devotedly; his flight to Switzerland in 1933 appears to have been primarily out of concern for her.[citation needed] Their only child, Erich, died of diphtheria in 1915 at the age of 21 as a volunteer in World War I. It was a loss that affected Braun deeply.
He was an impressive figure: almost 1.9 meters tall (6 ft. 2 in.), broadly built, strong-willed, with a marked organizational talent and an ability to lead even complex groups. He thought and acted in a matter-of-fact, sober manner but lacked both rhetorical skill and the ability to excite his listeners with a rousing speech. His political pragmatism was always guided by a deep humanist conviction of people's right to freedom and political equality.
In 1888, at the age of 16, Braun became involved with the SPD, which had been banned under the Anti-Socialist Laws of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Influenced by anarcho-syndicalism[citation needed] – a view that revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism was a way for workers to gain control of a capitalist economy – he initially belonged to the party's left wing. He was chairman of the Königsberg Workers' Election Association, the local party's legal front, and later producer, editor and printer of various Social Democratic periodicals. In a region where several attempts by the SPD to establish a party newspaper had failed, Braun successfully founded the Volkstribüne, later the Königsberger Volkszeitung, with no start-up capital, minimal support from party leadership and under difficult sales conditions in a rural area dominated by large-scale agriculture.
During the period he was particularly involved with the agricultural workers of East Prussia, and as a result he became an expert on agricultural policy within the SPD as well as a lifelong opponent of the landed Junkers of East Elbia, the area of Germany to the east of the Elbe river. In a later work, Das ostelbische Landproletariat ('The East Elbian Rural Proletariat'), he wrote in his unwieldy prose:
The exploited, disenfranchised East Elbian rural population is the pedestal on which the preponderant share of the power of the East Elbian Junkers rests and, propped on it, drives the policies of robbery that starve and disenfranchise the people. But the more the pedestal succeeds in spreading Social Democratic principles among the population groups that form it, the more rotten it must become.