Paul Löbe

Paul Löbe
Löbe (1924)
President of the Reichstag
In office 1925 – 30 August 1932
President	Paul von Hindenburg
Chancellor	Hans Luther Wilhelm Marx Hermann Müller Heinrich Brüning
Succeeded by	Hermann Göring
Personal details
Born	December 14, 1875(1875-12-14) Liegnitz, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Died	August 3, 1967(1967-08-03) (aged 91)
Political party	Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)

Paul Löbe (December 14, 1875 – August 3, 1967) was a German politician and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

Life and career

Löbe was born in Liegnitz in the Prussian Province of Silesia. He was trained as a typesetter and in 1898 he founded the local branch of the SPD in Ilmenau, Thuringia, where he also worked in a printing works. From 1900-20 he was the editor-in-chief of the Breslau Volkswacht. His journalistic work often landed him in prison, for instance, when he called on readers to come to a demonstration to protest against the Prussian three-class franchise. In 1901 he married Clara Schaller. Löbe did not serve in World War I on account of an illness in his lungs.

Löbe was imprisoned by the Nazi Party after the Machtergreifung in 1933, and again in 1944 after the July 20 Plot because of his connections with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler's resistance circle.

In 1945 Löbe joined the staff of the daily newspaper Das Volk, and later became co-publisher of the Telegraf. He died in West Germany's capital, Bonn.

Politics

Löbe joined the SPD in 1895 and was briefly its leader in 1933. After World War II, he was instrumental in the reconstruction of the party.

Elected positions

Löbe was elected to Breslau's city government in 1904 and he served as a member of the provincial Landtag of Silesia (1915–20). In 1919 he became the vice president of the Weimar National Assembly and from 1920 to 1933 he was a member of the German Reichstag, serving as its president (1920–24 and 1925–32) and vice-president (1932–33). In 1921 he became a member of the Prussian state council.

Löbe was a member of the Parlamentarischer Rat between 1948 and 1949 and the deputy chairman of the SPD faction. From 1949-53, he was a member of the Bundestag. Löbe was the oldest member of the Bundestag in its first legislative period, though he was not an elected member, but rather appointed by the Senate of West Berlin as their non-voting delegate to Bonn. The second oldest member was Konrad Adenauer, whom Löbe survived by three and a half months.

Honorary positions

The Paul Löbe House in Berlin.

From 1949 to 1954 Löbe was President of the German Council of the European Movement and in 1954 he became President of the Kuratorium Unteilbares Deutschland. In 1951 Löbe was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1955 he became an honorary citizen of Berlin. One of the new parliamentary buildings which serves Bundestag members in Berlin is named after Löbe.

Funeral Ceremony

At the time of his state funeral in August 1967 Andreas Baader (later a notorious Red Army Faction terrorist), the famous author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and others carried an empty coffin bearing the words “SENAT” to the front of the Berlin Schöneberg City Hall, where a commemorative ceremony was being held. Fellow demonstrators passed out leaflets proclaiming “Today you want to celebrate Paul Löbe up the chimney […] We want to bury a few smart corpses that are slowly stinking to high heaven,” followed by a list of the current members of the Berlin Senate. Although 24 of the demonstrators were arrested, some participants evaded the police, including Baader, Enzensberger and another later RAF terrorist, Gudrun Ensslin.

Publications

• Löbe, Paul, Erinnerungen eines Reichstagspräsidenten, Berlin 1949, republished as Der Weg war lang: Lebenserinnerungen, Berlin, 1953, 1954, 2002 (fifth edition).
• Löbe, Paul, "Gegenwartsfragen des Parlamentarismus," in: Für und Wider. Lebensfragen deutscher Politik, Offenbach am Main, 1952, pp. 39 to 48.
• Löbe, Paul, "Aus dem Parlamentarischen Leben," in: Hessische Hochschulwochen für Staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung, Volume 3, 1953, pp. 312 to 318.