Josef Stingl
Josef Stingl was a German politician who served as the longstanding president of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit|Bundesanstalt für Arbeit. From 1953 to 1968, he served as a member of the Bundestag. There, he took a particular interest in pensions and labour law.
Life
Provenance and early years
Stingl was born in Maria Kulm in the Egerland, which is where he grew up in a catholic family. Georg Stingl, his father, was a master baker, who died in 1933, as a result of which the latter part of Josef's childhood was spent in relative poverty. The frontier changes mandated in 1919 meant that as an infant he became a member of the ethnically German minority in Czechoslovakia. He attended secondary school in Eger, passing his school finals with high marks in 1938. 1938 was also the year in which the "Sudetenland" was annexed by Germany.War years
In December 1938 Stingl was conscripted as a "Fahnenjunker", working on :de:Flugabwehrkanone|anti-aircraft operations. During the Second World War he served in the Luftwaffe, becoming a spotter, a pilot and, by the time of his capture in 1945, an Oberleutnant. He ended the war with more than 200 missions flown. Sources keen to reconcile his military service on behalf of Hitler's Germany with the increasingly horrendous atrocities for which the regime was responsible stress that for Stingl, as a good catholic boy, military service to the fatherland would have been an obligation of honour even if he was critical of the regime. The pacifist's concept of a "duty to desert" would have been unthinkable. By the time war ended Stingl was being held by the English in Schleswig-Holstein as a prisoner of war. He was released relatively soon however. By the end of 1945 he had been forced by the ethnic cleansing of those times to leave his home region: with his young family he relocated to Berlin.Joseph Stingl married Dorothea Behmke in 1943: the marriage produced two recorded children.
New beginnings in Berlin
With much of the German capital reduced to rubble, as the rubble was cleared there was no shortage of building work, and it was as a building worker that Stingl initially supported his family. In 1947 he switched to a management/administrative position with a building business. Between 1948 and 1952 he was employed by a major home-building firm. His earnings were high enough for him to be able to fund university level studies through evening classes. As a former military officer he was not permitted access to Berlin university. He stayed on as a research assistant for a couple of terms after graduating. Later, between 1955 and 1971, he held a teaching contract in Political Sciences at the "Otto Suhr Institute", which in 1959 had been integrated into the US-backed Free University of Berlin. In addition, between 1952 and 1968, he held a side-appointment as an advisor on Social Policy to the Berlin-based :de:Industrie- und Handelskammer|"West German Chamber of Industry and Commerce.Politics
Josef Stingl joined the new CDU in 1947. There was a widespread belief that populist nationalists had been able to take power in 1933 because of political divisions between the more moderate parties of the political left and right. Launched in 1945, the CDU was a coming together of political groupings of the centre and moderate right which was intended to reduce the risk of any future power grab by extremists. Stingl rose through the party hierarchy, becoming deputy chair of the local party executive in Berlin-Reinickendorfin 1951 and a member of the regional party executive for Berlin in 1952, of which he became regional deputy chair in 1956. Further promotions through the party hierarchy continued, but after 1953 Stingl's political impact was based more directly on his role as a member of the Bundestag.Within the party Stingl was always seen as representative of the party's "workers' wing", reflecting his background as the son of an artisan and as a man who had only been able to obtain a university degree by earning money by day and studying in the evenings. He would always be a proponent of social equality.
Bundestag
Josef Stingl was elected a member of the West German Bundestag in September 1953 as one 22 members representing the territory becoming known as West Berlin. 6 of the 22 represented the CDU. He remained a Bundestag member without a break till 1968. Because of the complexities introduced by the semi-detached constitutional relationship between West Berlain and West Germany, there were, before 1990, no directly elected Bundestag members from Berlin. Stingl and his five party colleagues were accordingly electred because their names appeared on the party list for Berlin and then secured sufficient votes to earn the right for the top six candidates on the party list to be elected. Stingl was included on the candidate list in the expectation that he would contribute on the party's behalf, primarily, on matters of social policy. His fellow Berlin member, :de:Ernst Schellenberg |Ernst Schellenberg of the Social Democratic Party had already made a name for himself in respect of the same set of issues, and Stingl, on his election, succeeded in ensuring that social policy did not remain an SPD monopoly. Representing Berlin meant Stingl did not enjoy full voting rights in the West German Bundestag, but he nevertheless made 154 contributions in the parliament's plenary sessions, and he was not without influence, rapidly establishing himself as one of the CDU's leading experts on social policy.In 1957 Stingl formally became a member of the parliamentary executive of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, having by this time already attended a number of its meetings "by invitation". He was also a full member of various parliamentary committees. At the start of 1966 he became deputy chair of the parliamentary committee on social policy. Within the parliamentary group, between 1962 and his resignation from the Bundestag in 1968, he chaired the CDU/CSU working group on Social Policy. He continued to be closely involved in party policy making on these matters, notably in respect of pension reforms, even after 1968.
Bundesanstalt für Arbeit
Between 2 May 1968 and 30 March 1984 Josef Stingl served as president of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit|Bundesanstalt für Arbeit. During his tenure the organisation's national head office in Nuremberg was built and many of the smaller local "Arbeitsamt" offices were merged. It was a reflection of the length of his tenure that during the 1970s the expression "Ich arbeite bei Firma Stingl" became used as an ironic euphemism for "Ich bin arbeitslos". At a time when "media political correctness" was not yet ubiquitous, Josef Stingl, who was a more than averagely rotund gentleman, was also referred to as "der Bundesunke" in reference to his monthly media appearances to announce the deteriorating West German unemployment statistics.Away from the frontline
Between 1983 and 1990 Stingl took a post as an honorary professor at the University of Bamberg where he was assigned to the department of "professional further education". He did not go quietly into retirement. Instead he increased his involvement with the church and established himself as a leading spokesman for the victims of ethnic cleansing from the "Sudetenland" during 1944/45. He was committed to dialogue and reconciliation between the descendants of the Sudeten Germans and of the Czechs who had taken their place in those territories.After the death of his first wife Josef Stingl remarried and moved to Leutesdorf. During his final years he suffered from serious heart disease. He died at Leutesdorf on his eighty-fifth birthday.