Wachtling, Oswald: Joseph Joos – Journalist, Arbeiterführer, Zentrumspolitiker. Politische Biographie 1878–1933, Mainz 1974

Oswald Wachtling: Joseph Joos – Journalist, Arbeiterführer, Zentrumspolitiker. Politische Biographie 1878–1933.

The present study is devoted to the life’s work of Joseph Joos, (1878–1965) which finally receives the long-overdue attention it deserves, based on an evaluation of up-to-date sources. But Joos’s biography alone is not at the center of this investigation. Rather, the author uses Joos’s case to exemplify the cooperation between Catholic associations, the Catholic press, and political Catholicism. The political stance of the Catholic workers’ associations under Joos’s leadership during the late Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic is largely unknown. Owing to the historical »break« of 1933 and his own aloofness from party politics after 1945, Joos’s achievements have been widely forgotten even in the Catholic part of the population.

Joos’s main political accomplishment consists of having led a large segment of organized Catholic workers into the parliamentary republic and reconciling it to the existing form of democracy. In the Weimar-era Center Party, Joos belonged to those leaders working to achieve a political consensus within the socially riven party. In order to achieve a unified Catholicism that would be capable of acting decisively, Joos, as a »man of the middle,« often subordinated his own interests to the greater common goal. On account of that goal, he spent years as an inmate of Nazi concentration camps.