[3] By this time his political awareness had been fully awakened: between 1901 and 1919 Johannes Stelling worked as the editor of the Lübecker Volksbote [de], a Social Democrat daily newspaper serving Lübeck and the surrounding area.
[3] His period as editor was a long one, and according to the biographical note on Stelling that appears, alongside those of other members, in the "Reichstag Handbooks" of subsequent decades, he was imprisoned several times during these years.
Slightly more than two years later, in the municipal election of November 1907, the number of votes for Stelling in the city's "Electoral district II" had increased from 595 to 714, and the Lübecker Volksbote [de] was able to report to its readers an encouraging growth ("... einen erfreulichen Zuwachs") in the party's result.
For the next few years Stelling struggled to promote the interests of his supporters as a city councillor, while leaving no one in any doubt about his commitment to peace during a period characterised by rising military expenditure in Germany, Russia and Britain.
What is more, no one then would have believed that women would by now be represented"[3] From 1916 Stelling belonged to Lübeck's "Kriegshilfe" and "Landesversorgungsamt", created to provide welfare support to war victims.
Through the instability and desperate austerity of 1919 Stelling used his position on the city council and his role as a newspaper editor to campaigned energetically against war and in favour of revolutionary democratic changes.
[3] Revolutionary democratic changes had been adumbrated in November 1918 when the Kaiser abdicated and moved to a small town near Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Three months later, in February 1919, an assembly was convened at Weimar in central southern Germany, mandated to draft a post-imperial constitution.
Johannes Stelling, already a leading figure in city politics, was now elected as a member of the constitutional assembly meeting in Weimar.
[3] He also became a leading member, on behalf of the SPD, of the Black-red-gold national flag organisation, established by the major moderate political parties to oppose anti-democratic extremism.
[3] The political backdrop changed dramatically early in 1933 when the Nazi party took power and lost little time in imposing one-party dictatorship on Germany.
We were driven to Dahlwitzer Square, where we all had to get out and wait with our arms folded behind our heads, till a city bus turned up, which took us to the Seidler [restaurant] in Uhlenhorst.
Overnight on 21/22 June, under orders from a commander in the Nazi Party's military wing called Herbert Gehrke, Johannes Stelling was arrested,[9] along with several other who shared his political views.
One fellow party member arrested at the same time, along with his son, was Heinrich Reinefeld, a lawyer who was an eye witness to some of what happened next, and who survived to give his account of it.