Word: brauer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hamburg was a dying city when cragfaced Socialist Max Brauer returned in 1946. The mayor of Altona, a Hamburg suburb, he had fled Germany 13 years before, a jump ahead of the Storm Troopers, winding up in the U.S., where he became German expert for the American Federation of Labor...
Back in Hamburg on a job for the A.F.L., he decided to stay. "America does not need me," he said. "Germany does." He renounced his U.S. citizenship and was elected mayor of Hamburg. Mayor Brauer's task looked impossible: in three blockbusting nights, British bombers had leveled half the city; 300,000 of its 560,000 dwellings were destroyed, more than in all Britain. Huge mounds in the city cemetery were a memorial to Hamburg's 80,000 air-raid victims; the once-busy harbor lay choked with 3,000 wrecks...
Rubble Lift. Under Brauer's direction, three narrow-gauge railroads were driven into Hamburg's ruins to cart out the rubble; at the peak one train ran every ten minutes, loaded with 4,000 tons of scrap steel and mortar. Hamburg rebuilt faster than any other city in Germany: 130.000 homes. 52 schools, enough new jobs to employ 65,000 more workers than prewar. Shipping shot back to 70% of normal, production rose 6% over 1936. Back to its prewar population of 1,600,000, Hamburg once more became West Germany's biggest city...
...Brauer could be brusque; lagging subordinates heard him roar: "You are so stupid." He told citizens of his city, which was old when New York was still Indian territory: "In America they do it thus and so." He wrathfully shoved aside the time-consuming forms and protocol of German bureaucracy that he called "the new totalitarianism of our time." He irritated his own Social Democratic Party by publicly lambasting "shallow, commonplace Socialism, exhausting itself in theory...
...vigorous Fiorello LaGuardia tradition, Max Brauer was a good mayor. Pointing to reborn Hamburg, he trumpeted: "My administration has done this. I intend to stay." But this week 66-year-old Max Brauer was out of the Rathaus. In local municipal elections to choose the 120-man Hamburg State Assembly, which in turn selects the mayor, a four-party conservative bloc inched out Brauer's Social Democrats. The coalition won 50% of the vote, and 62 Assembly seats to the Socialists...