Georg Gradnauer

Who was Georg Gradnauer?

Georg Gradnauer was a German newspaper editor and politician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and the first elected Minister-President of Saxony following the abolition of the Kingdom of Saxony.

Born in Magdeburg, Gradnauer earned a PhD in 1889, and became editor of the Sächsischen Arbeiterzeitung, the SPD paper in Saxony, in 1891. A relative moderate within the Saxon SPD, he was replaced as editor by radicals Alexander Parvus and Julian Marchlewski in 1896. Gradnauer subsequently moved to the SPD's Berlin paper, Vorwärts, where he worked from 1897 with fellow reformists Friedrich Stampfer and Kurt Eisner, until 1905, when they were ousted in favor of editors from the SPD's left wing. Gradnauer then returned to head the Sächsischen Arbeiterzeitung once more, which had by that point been renamed the Dresdner Volkszeitung, and remained in that role until the outbreak of the German Revolution in 1918. In parallel with this newspaper work, he served as an SPD delegate to the Reichstag, in two stints: 1898 to 1907, and 1912 to 1918.