Edwin Hoernle

Edwin Hoernle (11 December 1883 – 21 July 1952) was a German communist politician, author, educator, agricultural economist and a Marxist theoretician. An early member of the Zentrale and Politburo of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), he served in the Reichstag from 1925 to 1933 and was one of the party's leading agricultural experts.

He spent the Nazi period in Moscow where, during the final years of the Second World War, he was a founding member of the Soviet-backed National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD). Following the war's end, he served as minister of agriculture in the Soviet occupation zone, resigning shortly before the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1949.

Life Provenance and early years Edwin Hoernle was born in Cannstatt, a rapidly industrialising suburb on the northern edge of Stuttgart. Hermann Hoernle, his father, was a Christian missionary who later became a rural parson. He was one of his parents' four recorded children. Because of his father's calling, Edwin Hoernle spent the earlier years of his childhood, till 1889, in the East Indies. His mother, Marie, was the daughter of an organ builder.

Education, politics and first marriage At the age of ten, by now growing up in the village of Beimbach back in Württemberg, he was already writing poems and beginning to distance himself ideologically from the Protestant piety of his parents. Hoernle was schooled privately between 1890 and 1896. He then attended secondary schools in Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart, successfully completing his school final exams (Abitur) in 1902. He performed his military service with an infantry regiment in 1903. In 1912 he became editor of the "Feuilleton section" of the SPD regional daily newspaper . After war broke out he and his co-editors, Jacob Walcher and Arthur Crispien received a party reprimand because they were deeply critical of the party leadership, which had implemented what amounted to a parliamentary truce over the issue of voting to fund the war. In 1916 Hoerle joined the anti-war Spartacus League. On 23/24 April 1916 he attended the (illegal) "Opposition Socialist Youth" conference in Jena as a delegate from the Stuttgart Young Socialists. He was arrested in June 1916 and sent to the frontline in August 1916 as a member of a "punishment battalion". He was arrested again in April 1917 and assigned to a Punishment Unit after it was determined that he had been distributing copies of the illegal anti-war so-called "Spartakusbriefe" (Spartacus Letters). Badly wounded in September 1918, he was transferred to an army hospital facility in Stuttgart the following month. He remained a Reichstag member through a period of increasing political polarisation, leading to parliamentary deadlock, till 1933. By the end of 1933 he had made his way to Moscow, which was quickly becoming one of two informal headquarter locations for the exiled KPD. By this time, back in Germany, he had been convicted 'in absentia' of high treason and sentenced to death.

Almost immediately on his arrival in Berlin the zone's military administrators appointed him vice-president of the administration for Brandenburg. As a more extensive administrative structure was established, on 15 August 1945 he became the zone's president of the committee of Agriculture and Forestry for the German Economic Commission, a role broadly equivalent to the Minister of Agriculture under a western-style civilian administration. He applied to be allowed to retire - almost certainly on genuine health grounds - early in 1948, but his resignation was accepted only in September 1949. He then accepted a less onerous posting as Dean of Faculty for Agriculture Policy at the (DASR) at Forst Zinna (in the countryside on the southern side of Berlin).

Edwin Hoernle died of heart failure, after a long period of illness, at a sanatorium in Bad Liebenstein, beyond Erfurt, in the extreme south of what had by now become the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Personal tragedy Edwin Hoernle's son by his first marriage, Alfred Hoernle, became a skilled factory worker and was also politically engaged. After 1933 he served (illegally) as the head of the local KPD on the sub-region of Berlin-Reinickendorf. He was arrested during 1936 and on 4 November 1937 sentenced to five years of imprisonment. According to testimonies provided by surviving fellow prisoners, Alfred Hoernle was suspected by comrades of having provided large amounts of information to the security services: while held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp he was "hanged" by fellow prisoners. He seems to have survived that treatment, but was then starved to death.

Publications (selection)

Hinter den Kulissen einer königlichen Hofbühne. Ein Beitrag zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Lage der deutschen Bühnenkünstler. Schimmel, Stuttgart 1914. Aus Krieg und Kerker. Spartakus Verlag, Stuttgart-Degerloch 1918. Sozialistische Jugenderziehung und sozialistische Jugendbewegung. Verlag "Junge Garde", Berlin 1919. Die kommunistische Schule. Schulprogramm der Freien Sozialistischen Jugend Deutschlands (Entwurf). Verlag "Junge Garde", Berlin 1919. Die Oculi-Fabeln. Oskar Wöhrle, Stuttgart 1920. Oculi. Eine Auswahl. Hrsg., Nachwort von Hansgeorg Meyer. Kinderbuchverlag, Berlin 1980. Der Jud’ ist Schuld [!]. Ein ernstes Wort an alle Kleinbauern, Häusler und Landarbeiter!. Berlin und Leipzig 1921. (Polemik gegen den Antisemitismus) Die Arbeiterklasse und ihre Kinder. Ein ernstes Wort an die Arbeitereltern. Internationaler Jugendverlag, Berlin 1921. Arbeiter, Bauer und Spartakus. Ein Bühnenspiel in einem Aufzug. Verlag "Junge Garde", Berlin 1921. Die Arbeit in dem Kommunistischen Kindergruppen. Verlag der Arbeiterbuchhandlung, Wien 1923. Rote Lieder. Gedichte. Verlag der Jugendinternationale, Wien 1924. Rote Lieder. Gedichte. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1963. Das Herz muß schlagen. Mit einem Vorwort von Alexander Abusch. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin und Weimar 1968. Die Industrialisierung der deutschen Landwirtschaft, eine neue Phase kapitalistischer Monopolherrschaft. Internationaler Arbeiter-Verlag, Berlin 1928. Grundfragen der proletarischen Erziehung. Verlag der Jugendinternationale, Berlin 1929. Grundfragen der proletarischen Erziehung. Hrsg. von Lutz von Werder und Reinhart Wolff. März Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969.(=März Archi 5) Grundfragen der proletarischen Erziehung. Hrsg. von Lutz von Werder und Reinhart Wolff. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1973. . Bauern unterm Joch. Erzählung. Verlagsgenossenschaft Ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, Moskau 1936. Deutsche Bauern unterm Hakenkreuz. Editions Promethee, Paris 1939. Deutsche Bauern unterm Hakenkreuz. Herausgegeben von Lothar Berthold und Dieter Lange. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1983. (=Antifaschistische Literatur in der Bewährung. Band 6) Wilhelm Pieck, Edwin Hoernle: Demokratische Bodenreform. Verlag Neuer Weg, Berlin 1945. Die Bodenreform. Ein Weg zu Demokratie und Frieden. Deutscher Bauernverlag, Berlin 1946. Die demokratische Bodenreform in der Bewährungsprobe. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1947. Grundfragen der proletarischen Erziehung. Pädagogische und bildungspolitische Schriften. Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Wolfgang Mehnert. Volk und Wissen, Berlin 1958. Ein Leben für die Bauernbefreiung. Das Wirken Edwin Hoernles als Agrarpolitiker und eine Auswahl seiner agrarpolitischen Schriften. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1965. Der kleine König und die Sonne. Kinderbuchverlag, Berlin 1976.