IG Metall in Hanover presents a slightly different history book
“It is always said that Hanover’s city planning officer Hillebrecht built Hanover, but the heating fitters and metal workers do not appear in most history books,” says Lower Saxony’s former IG Metall boss Hartmut Meine. Meine has now helped with many others and written a history book of a somewhat different art. About works councils, strikes and hunger crises. And the lively history of IG Metall, whose nucleus was also Hanover after 1945.
Quartered in completely bombed Hanover
In a lively event before (corona-related) only 70 guests in the Ricklingen leisure center Dirk Schulze, first representative of the industrial union, and the team around Meine presented the book (“Arguing and shaping”, DVA-Verlag Hamburg). With reports from contemporary witnesses, you brought musical interludes back to life (by no means always beautiful) old times. The construction period in the completely bombed-out city of Hanover, in which the later IG Metall federal chairman Jürgen Peters had to share two rooms with five others. He and his family had been forcibly quartered with two old ladies in Limmer.
Contemporary witnesses report how they were recruited from Italy in the 1950s to work for the municipal utilities or in the newly created VW plant in Stöcken in 1956. The interviewed authors have rummaged through newspaper archives and worked through a number of minutes of the minutes of the board of directors. Otto Brenner, who was born in Hanover in 1903 and who built up unions (smashed by the Nazis) after the war.
In seven time periods, the authors report on collective bargaining disputes, including internal disputes – from the eyes of shop stewards and works councils. With Otto Brenner, who would be 114 on the day the book was presented, and Jürgen Peters, two federal chairmen, have also shaped the history of their union from Hanover.
By Michael B. Berger