38 Facts About Otto Brenner

Otto Brenner was a German trades unionist and politician.

Otto Brenner was born and grew up in Hanover, the third of his parents' four children.

Otto Brenner worked next to an extremely hot industrial furnace which produced high levels of carbon monoxide.

Otto Brenner joined the Young Socialists in 1920 and the Metal Workers' Union in 1922.

Otto Brenner demonstrated a commitment to political education, leading the Marxist study circle of the Hanover Young Socialists and developing his own philosophy of socialism.

Otto Brenner drew valuable lessons about both the responsibilities and the sheer power of trades unions from the experience.

Otto Brenner had long held a strong belief in the power of self-education and over the several years of unemployment that ensued he was able to devote more time to reading political books.

Otto Brenner decried what he saw as the "capitulation policy" of the SPD leadership and their trades union allies.

Otto Brenner called for a "united proletarian front" of the KPD, SPD and SAPD.

Otto Brenner nevertheless believed in the need to use the party as an instrument of resistance to tyranny, and despite the ban continued to work on party recruitment and organisation.

Otto Brenner visited a number of cities in order to create and build contacts with local SAPD parties across the country.

On 30 August 1930 after he returned from one of his trips, Otto Brenner was arrested and taken into investigatory custody.

Otto Brenner was deemed "wehrunwurdig" and therefore, despite the return of war in September 1939, he avoided conscription.

Otto Brenner was sent to work in Frankfurt on civil engineering projects and as a courier for the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Schumacher persuaded Otto Brenner to become active in local and "national" politics in what was administered between 1945 and 1949 as the British occupation zone.

Early on Otto Brenner decided to devote himself to recreating the trades unions, which had been destroyed under the Hitler government.

Otto Brenner was the most prominent of the strike leaders, and his name appeared in news reports far beyond the Hanover city limits.

Otto Brenner demanded "full co-decision rights for factory and office employees in the enterprise and in the economy".

Otto Brenner's reputation buoyed by these successes, in 1947 Brenner became district head of what would become IG Metall Hanover.

Otto Brenner therefore hoped for an overcoming of capitalism or, failing that, a far reaching taming of it.

Between 1952 and 1956 Otto Brenner served as vice-chairman of IG Metall, with Hans Brummer as senior chairman.

Otto Brenner refused to see that as a reason to compromise on the basic tenets of the "Munich Programme" agreed within the DGB in 1949.

Otto Brenner was feared as a tough negotiator, but capable of compromise, his demands were not simply for parity between negotiating partners, but that employers and employees should receive a fair share of the wealth they jointly generated.

Otto Brenner claimed this duty of intervene most especially if he saw that the democratic principles of the Federal Republic were threatened, because he recognised that preserving the rule of law in as democratic state governed by laws was the indispensable precondition for the successful operation of trades unions.

Otto Brenner contended that if the two German states were integrated into competing international power blocs, a rapid peaceful reunification would become unthinkable.

Otto Brenner campaigned with characteristic energy against the changes, both in the discussions that took place between 1954 and 1958 with the "programme commission" drawing up what became the Godesberg Program and, especially, in parallel discussions for a new Godesberg-compatible Trades Union Confederation programme.

Otto Brenner rejected such a model, as did his colleagues on the union executive.

Otto Brenner rejected repeated demands that trades unions must take a share in responsibility for the wider economy.

Otto Brenner was challenged with the metaphor that the unions were in the same boat as other members of society.

Between 1946 and 1953 Otto Brenner served as an SPD City councillor in Hannover.

Otto Brenner never compromised his conviction that the "strike weapon" was inalienable as a means to enforce workers' rights in any bourgeois democracy.

Otto Brenner was able to bring a keen historical perspective to the matter, having himself lived through the curtailment of basic rights during the Hitler years.

Otto Brenner always believed that there was a residual latent danger of Fascism in the German Federal Republic, not because he feared a National Socialist revival in the state formed under Adenauer during the 1950s.

Otto Brenner respected the Bundestag decision, much to the disappointment of various younger union colleagues who had hoped that he would call a general strike over the issue.

Otto Brenner was adamant that as a democrat he had to respect a parliamentary majority decision even when he believed it to wrong.

Otto Brenner was no revolutionary and never wished to become one.

Otto Brenner died of Cardiovascular disease in April 1972, aged just 64.

Otto Brenner found his failure to achieve it a painful thing.