Karl Maron
Minister of Interior
In office
1 July 1955 – 14 November 1963
Preceded byWilli Stoph
Succeeded byFriedrich Dickel
Personal details
Born27 April 1903
Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Died2 February 1975 (aged 71)
East Berlin, German Democratic Republic
NationalityGerman
Political partySocialist Unity Party of Germany

Karl Maron (1903–1975) was a German politician, who served as the interior minister of East Germany. He also assumed different posts in East Germany's government.

Early life and education

Maron was born in Berlin on 27 April 1903 and was educated in Russia.[1][2]

Career

Maron was a metal worker.[3] In 1926, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).[3] During the Nazi regime, he left Germany in 1934 for Denmark and then settled in Russia.[1][3] He returned to Berlin under the protection of a Russian general a few days after the Red Army captured the city in 1945.[1] Following his return he became deputy lord mayor of Berlin and the chief of police.[4][5] As a deputy mayor one of his significant tasks was to rename the streets of Berlin.[5] In 1946, he joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).[3][6] From 1946 to 1950 he was the chief editor of daily Neues Deutschland, which was founded in 1946 by the SED.[3] He was also the director of Berlin municipality's economy department at the end of the 1940s.[7]

He became the chief of the German people’s police or more commonly Volkspolizei in June 1950 when former chief Kurt Fischer died.[8] In February 1953, he publicly argued "the Volkspolizei can never be neutral or unpolitical."[8] In 1954, he was named as the member of SED's central committee.[3] During his tenure as the chief of Volkspolizei he also assumed the role of deputy interior minister.[9]

Maron was appointed interior minister on 1 July 1955, replacing Willi Stoph in the post.[10] In this position he was promoted in 1962 to Generaloberst. In 1961, he became a member of the working group formed by the Politburo to develop ways to end refugee flow from East Germany.[11] The other members of the group were then security chief Erich Honecker and Stasi chief Erich Mielke.[11] Maron's tenure as interior minister ended on 14 November 1963.[12] He was succeeded by Friedrich Dickel as interior minister.[13] From 1958 to 1967 he served as the representative of Volkskammer.[3] In 1964, Maron founded the Institute for Demoscopy (Institut für Meinungsforschung in German) that was a demoscopic research body sponsored by the SED.[14]

Personal life and death

Maron was the step-father of author Monika Maron.[12][15] Karl Maron married her mother in 1955.[16] He died in 1975.[3][17]

Legacy

A street in East Berlin was named after him, Karl-Maron-Straße, in the 1970s and 1980s.[18]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "In Berlin zone". Toledo Blade. 8 December 1948. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  2. ↑ "Karl Maron" (in German). DDR Lexicon. Retrieved 23 February 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Caroline Schaumann (2008). Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany's Nazi Past in Recent Women's Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 255. ISBN 978-3-11-020659-3.
  4. ↑ "Berlin and London think Hitler alive". Toronto Daily Star. 8 September 1945. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  5. 1 2 Maoz Azaryahu (October 2011). "The politics of commemorative street renaming: Berlin 1945-1948". Journal of Historical Geography. 37 (4): 485. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2011.06.001.
  6. ↑ "1 July 1961". Chronik der Mauer. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  7. ↑ "Reds take complete control of Berlin city hall". The Day. 1 December 1948. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  8. 1 2 Richard Bessel (2003). "Policing in East Germany in the wake of the Second World". Crime, History & Societies. 7 (2): 5–21. doi:10.4000/chs.539. JSTOR 42708536.
  9. ↑ Josie McLellan (March 2007). "State Socialist Bodies: East German Nudism from Ban to Boom". The Journal of Modern History. 79: 48–79. doi:10.1086/517544. S2CID 144281349.
  10. ↑ Deirdre Byrnes (2011). Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-text and Context. Oxford: Peter Lang. p. 138. ISBN 978-3-03911-422-1.
  11. 1 2 Hope M. Harrison (2011). Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961. Princeton; London: Princeton University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-1-4008-4072-4.
  12. 1 2 Catherine Epstein (1999). "The Production of "Official Memory" in East Germany: Old Communists and the Dilemmas of Memoir-Writing". Central European History. 32 (2): 183. doi:10.1017/s0008938900020896.
  13. ↑ Hans-Hermann Hertle (Winter–Spring 2001). "The Fall of the Wall: The Unintended Self-Dissolution of East Germany's Ruling Regime" (PDF). Cold War International History Project Bulletin (12–13): 1–31. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2012.
  14. ↑ Patrick Major (2002). "Introduction". In Patrick Major; Johnathan Osmond (eds.). The Workers' and Peasants' State: Communism and Society in East Germany Under Ulbricht, 1945-71. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-7190-6289-6.
  15. ↑ Ulf Zimmermann (1 January 2005). "Monika Maron. Geburtsort Berlin". World Literature Today. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  16. ↑ Deirdre Byrnes (2011). Rereading Monika Maron (PDF). Oxford: BI50. ISBN 978-3-0353-0056-7. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2016.
  17. ↑ Donna Harsch (June 2023). "Echoes of Silence: The Politics of Generational Memory in East Germany's Literary Intelligentsia". German History. 41 (2): 249. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghad016.
  18. ↑ Jani Vuolteenaho; Guy Puzey (2018). "'Armed with an Encyclopedia and an Axe': The socialist and post-socialist street toponymy of East Berlin revisited through Gramsci". In Reuben Rose-Redwood; Derek Alderman; Maoz Azaryahu (eds.). The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place (PDF). London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315554464. ISBN 9780367667733.
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