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 (), 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.
Life and character
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. 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 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 the SPD 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 – 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 , later the , 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, ('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.Braun was also co-founder of the German Agricultural Workers' Union, chairman of the local health insurance fund and a member of the Königsberg City Council.
In 1892 Braun received a two month prison sentence for lèse-majesté. In November 1903 prosecutors accused him of exporting anarchist writings to Russia that called for the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. He was arrested, and in 1904 proceedings were instituted against him and eight other Social Democrats for high treason. Braun spent over five months in pretrial detention awaiting what came to be known as the "Königsberg secret society trial". Braun was defended by fellow East Prussian Social Democrat Hugo Haase, who in the process revealed the cooperation of the Prussian police with the Russian secret service Okhrana. The evidence against Braun was not considered substantive by the court, and he was acquitted.
In 1898 Braun became chairman of the East Prussian SPD and in 1905 assumed his first party office at the Reich level as a member of the Control Commission. In 1911 he moved up to the Reich Executive Committee of the SPD as chief treasurer where he remained until 1917. In 1913 he won a seat in the Prussian House of Representatives which he kept until 1933. Although he initially belonged to the left wing of the party, as an autodidact he was very different from the often highly educated Spartacists and Communists. He found their argumentation too unworldly, too theoretical and too little oriented toward practical and attainable goals. He once criticized Rosa Luxemburg for her "insufferable schoolmasterly manner". In 1895, commenting on discussions in the party about an agrarian program, he said that "for practical agitation the draft offers nothing. There, as in the whole debate, they argued doctoral questions." After the party rejected the draft, he said, "So let us leave our program, which has already helped us over many a mountain and led to many a victory, completely untouched for the time being, and let us not tinker around with it so much; that can lead to no good results. But it is different with our tactics, which on the basis of our program have to adapt naturally to the respective conditions in all locations."
During World War I, Braun sided with the SPD's more moderate wing that supported the Reichstag's Burgfriedenspolitik, which was intended to prevent domestic political disputes during the war. When the left wing of the SPD split off in 1917 to form the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), Braun stayed with the majority in the MSPD. He participated in the organization of the strike of January 1918, in which 400,000 workers, primarily in munitions plants, unsuccessfully went on strike. At the end of the war and the start of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, he became a representative of the MSPD on the Berlin Workers' and Soldiers' Council, which was set up on the pattern of Russian soviets. With Braun's concern about reliability and organizational efficiency, he was not happy in the council. Its majorities often changed, its composition was highly dependent on chance, and the discussions frequently did not revolve around practical issues but got lost in ideological debates about principles. Because of his experience with it he retained a lifelong aversion to "the wretchedness () of councils".
In 1919 and 1920 Braun was a member of the Weimar National Assembly, which was both the new Republic's interim parliament and the body that drafted and adopted the Weimar Constitution. From 1920 to 1933, he was a member of the German Reichstag. Due to conflicts of interest between the Reich and Prussia and because of Braun's often hands-on and unconventional manner, he and the SPD's party leadership became estranged even though both the national and the Prussian parliaments were often governed by what came to be called the Weimar Coalition made up of the SPD, the center-left German Democratic Party (DDP) and the center-right Catholic Centre Party. While as a pragmatist Braun focused his actions primarily on the interests of the coalition in Prussia and thus on the stability of the government, the SPD's own interests took precedence for the leadership of both the party and the Reichstag parliamentary group. Especially after the Majority Social Democratic Party and the USPD reunited in September 1922, conflicts often arose over the proper political course. Personal rivalries, especially between Braun and SPD party chairman Otto Wels, continued to worsen the climate and communications. Braun accused the SPD leadership of acting irresponsibly, and Wels thought that Braun's behavior toward the party was reckless and that he lacked respect for Social Democratic principles.
In the Prussian government In 1918, after the fall of the monarchy, Braun became Prussia's Minister of Agriculture under Minister President Paul Hirsch. He opposed the breakup of Prussia that many were proposing following the war. In contrast to the ultra-conservative government of Bavaria which was referred to as an ('cell of order'), he saw Prussia as Germany's democratic . He also feared that the dissolution of Prussia, which covered about two-thirds of Germany in area but was very inhomogeneous in composition, would strengthen the annexation demands of the victorious powers.
As Minister of Agriculture he attempted an agrarian reform designed primarily to strip the great landowners east of the Elbe of their power. The centerpiece of his idea was a policy that would settle former soldiers on fallow lands. The soldiers would have obtained civilian employment, and at the same time the strained food situation in Germany would have improved. Fierce resistance from large-scale agriculturalists, Hirsch's hesitant stance and the fact that Braun's plans ran counter to law caused them for the most part to fail.
When the Allied demands in the Treaty of Versailles became known on 7 May 1919, the outrage of the public and the political leadership was fierce. On 21 May 1919 Braun said in Lyck, East Prussia:Never in the history of the world has such a shameless fraud been perpetrated on a people as this. ... The Prussian State Government and the Reich Government, in agreement with the entirety of the people's representatives, have taken the stand that the treaty is calculated to lead the German people into permanent slavery, and that it is therefore completely unacceptable to us and must not be signed.
Minister President Braun was Prussian Minister President from March 1920 to March 1921, November 1921 to January 1925, and April 1925 to May 1932. Ironically, he became Minister President only because he seemed more dangerous to his opponents in the SPD as Minister of Agriculture, and they lobbied the other coalition parties to make him Minister President. He thus became the most powerful man in what was by far the largest and most populous state in the Weimar Republic.