Eduard Müller

Who was Eduard Müller?

Eduard Müller was a German Roman Catholic theologian and politician from the Prussian Province of Silesia.

The priest was since 1852 a missionary vicar in Berlin who promoted the foundation of catholic communities in and near Berlin, like the St.-Eduard-Gemeinde which officially opened at Kranholdplatz in Berlin-Rixdorf in 1907.

In Protestant Prussia, Müller was elected to the Preußischer Landtag in November 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. At that time Bismarck on behalf of the North German Confederation negotiated with the mostly Catholic Southern German states in order to form a unified nation state. When the Prussian assembly first met in December, Müller lobbied for a unification of the Catholic members into a fraction He is credited as a co-founder of the Centre Party in 1871.

In the 1871 elections to the new Reichstag, he surprisingly defeated the incumbent in the constituency of the Duchy of Pless-Rybnik in of Upper Silesia, Victor Herzog von Ratibor, the Duke of Ratibor, a Free Conservative Catholic aristocratic landowner who recently had headed a delegation to the Vatican. Silesian magnates were accustomed to dictating elections.