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Karl Maron

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Karl Maron
Minister of the Interior of the German Democratic Republic
In office
1 July 1955 – 14 November 1963
Preceded byWilli Stoph
Succeeded byFriedrich Dickel
Member of the Volkskammer
In office
1958–1967
Personal details
Born(1903-04-27)27 April 1903
Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Died2 February 1975(1975-02-02) (aged 71)
East Berlin, German Democratic Republic
Resting placeZentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin
NationalityGerman
Political party

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

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

Career

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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

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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

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

References

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  1. ^ a b c "In Berlin zone". Toledo Blade. 8 December 1948. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  2. ^ "Karl Maron" (in German). DDR Lexicon. Retrieved 23 February 2022.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h 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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b 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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