Talk:Fritz Kater

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[edit] Edits

As requested, I did some general copyediting to this article. It should still be read by someone who knows Kater's biography well, and by someone who understands German. There are some issues which I attempted to clear up, but may have been mistaken on. For example: 1) I assume Kater was asked to run as a delegate to the Reichstag. It could be that there were appointed delegates to the Reichstag; I don't know. I changed the sentence to indicate that he decline to run for office. 2) I assume Kater was chairman of the FAUD. The intent of the second-to-last paragraph may have been that he was chairman of the IWA. I don't know, so someone should check on that. Finally, I changed some language so that it reflect colloquial English a bit more closely. The original language was fine, but some terms (such as "functionary") sound odd to a modern English-speaker's ears or would be open to certain interpretations which the author may not have intended. ("Functionary," for example, often implies a low-level bureaucrat to many English-speakers. "Staff person" is a more neutral term. The reader still understands that Kater was not elected to a role in the trade unions but he was also not low-level or a mere bureaucrat within the unions.) Feel free to change things back as you see fit. - Tim1965 15:27, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your help, Tim. I did change a few things. "Die" means "the" in German so "the Die Jungen" would redundant. I changed "centrist" back to "centralist", because this is supposed to express that this branch of the labor movement rejected the decentralized or "Localist" structure advocated by Kater and the FVdG. This conflict was the main reason for the FVdG's departure from the mainstream labor movement. I also changed "converted to socialism", because I think that sounds a bit too religious.--Carabinieri 22:39, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Centralist?

Look at this paragraph:

In 1907, after Kater refused a staff job with the centralist trade unions and declined to run as a delegate to the Reichstag delegate, he left the SPD.

"Centralist" is not really a word in English. Is the sense of the paragraph to mean "politically mainstream" or "main" or "primary" or trade unions? Perhaps the sense of the sentence should be "larger trade unions"? Perhaps the sense of the sentence is "non-anarchist"? In which case I'd propose "centralized", "centrally-organized", "hierarchical, bureaucratized" or "non-anarchist". (English has no word for "non-anarchist" except "non-anarchist." Besides, I think "anarchist organization" is an oxymoron, but that's just me.) - Tim1965 12:25, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

According to webster.com, "centralist" is actually the adjective form of "centralism". I don't think "centrally-organized", "hierarchical, bureaucratized" or "non-anarchist" fit, because the term is referring to a specific current in the German socialist labor movement. After 1890, with the start of the centralization in the movement, there were two distinct currents, the centralists and the localists. I consulted my English-language sources on the topic again and I discovered that they only use "centralist trade unions" once, usually using "centralized trade unions" or "centralists" as a translation for Zentralgewerkschaften instead. So I'm gonna change it both here and in the FVdG article to "centralized trade unions". Thanks for the heads-up.--Carabinieri 22:41, 9 September 2007 (UTC)