Background
August Winnig was born in Blankenburg, Harz, on 31 March 1878 - the youngest son in a large family - and experienced grinding poverty and disillusionment in his childhood and adolescent years.
August Winnig was born in Blankenburg, Harz, on 31 March 1878 - the youngest son in a large family - and experienced grinding poverty and disillusionment in his childhood and adolescent years.
He was editor of its organ Der Grundstein from 1905 and elected its Vice-President in 1913. Winnig belonged to the ‘social-imperialist’ wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1917-18 he was Minister Plenipotentiary to the Baltic Provinces and Reich Commissioner for East and West Prussia.
In 1919 Oberprasident of East Prussia, he was removed from office a year later and expelled from the SPD for his participation in the Kapp putsch. Winnig’s literary works in the last years of the Weimar Republic and under the Third Reich provide an illuminating account of the history of German social democracy between 1878 and 1933, and of his personal odyssey; they also reflect his love of nature, his Christian beliefs and working-class background.
Winnig set out his own conservative nationalist credo. His Lutheran convictions led him to oppose the neo-pagan tendencies in the Third Reich and to withdraw from politics into the ‘inner emigration'.
Winnig died in Bad Nauheim on 3 November 1956.
FrUhrot
1924Wir hiiten das Feuer
1933