[1] Driven by a conviction that alcohol and tobacco were contributing to the catastrophic material condition and what he perceived as the political lethargy of working people, he campaigned energetically against their misuse, and in 1926 founded a local branch of the German Workers' Abstinence League ("Deutscher Arbeiter-Abstinenten-Bund" / DAAB), taking on the chairmanship himself.

[1] It was in 1925, after a period of illness, that he took unskilled work in the electrical components section of the local Hanomag railway locomotive and road vehicle plant.

He also demonstrated a commitment to political education, leading the Marxist study circle of the Hanover Young Socialists and developing his own (not always uncritical) philosophy of socialism.

At around the same time that he launched the local DAAB branch, by now aged 21, he also joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).

Brenner had long held a strong belief in the power of self-education, however, and over the several years of unemployment that ensued he was able to devote more time to reading political books.

[1] As later as 1932 the SPD held the largest number of seats in the Reichstag (national parliament), and even at the July 1932 election they still comfortably out-polled the Communists.

[1] During the summer of 1933 he was also involved with the Committee for Proletarian Unity, a resistance group built up since 1930 by the Hanover communist Eduard Wald, apparently in anticipation of the National Socialist take-over.

In most cases other businesses in the area, when threatened with strike action, chose to head off the threat by adopting equivalent agreements in respect of their own factories.

Even if the top priority for a negotiation was wage rates, his approach to trades union strategy was always a far wider one, grounded in a social philosophical vision.

That meant that for Brenner, capitalism, which after 1949 West Germans experienced as the "social market economy" ("soziale Marktwirtschaft"), also incorporated private ownership of the means of production, giving rise to an unequal balance of power and control/ownership in the political sphere.

[18] Behind the scenes the "Circle of Ten" exercised a powerful influence over key personnel selections and strategic decisions taken by the trades union movement.

[18][19][20] The West German election result of 1949 saw Konrad Adenauer's CDU-FDP coalition narrowly winning power, which was both a disappointment for SPD supporters (such as Otto Brenner) and a surprise for commentators and others from across the political spectrum.

For Brenner and the trades union movement more widely the result represented a temporary deferral but not an abolition for their shared objective of a rapid and fundamental transformation of social relationships in the newly launched German Federal Republic (West Germany).

[8] Alongside the business of wage negotiations and promoting a social-political strategy, there was necessarily always a more directly party-political dimension to trades union leadership during Otto Brenner's time at the top.

From beyond the no longer so porous internal border, reports seeping through from friends and relatives of the short-lived and brutally suppressed 1953 East German uprising did nothing to refute the growing belief that the postwar Communist Party of Germany should best be understood as a proxy for Soviet imperialist aspirations.

In the inter-union conflicts that were a feature of the West German industrial scene during the 1950s he was uncompromising in his hostility to communist activism, which he saw as a serious threat to trades union solidarity.

Within IG Metall Brenner rigorously excluded from positions of power any trades unionists who refused to distance themselves from the goals of the KPD and SED.

[8] The Spiegel affair in 1962 confirmed him in his assessment that "the democratic order, and above all those called upon to serve as its guardians, are still not immune from the temptations of authoritarian undemocratic operations".

[g][24][25] A few years later he unhesitatingly lined up the union alongside the "Extra parliamentary opposition" during the run-up to the contentious "Emergency Acts" constitutional amendments eventually imposed on the country in 1968 by the Allied Control Council.

[1] His opposition to the arms build-up was reinforced by his conviction that militarisation on the ground made it even harder to envisage any future peaceful reunification of the two Germanies on either side of the iron curtain.

Internationally the use of Soviet military muscle in 1956 to crush reform movements in Hungary and Poland, the Suez Crisis of the same year, the sealing off of the internal German border during the 1950s, culminating in with the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the overall intensification of Cold War tensions which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war combined to determine that during the 1950s and most of the 1960s insufficient West Germany voters were willing to vote against the centre-right CDU/CSU coalition under the reassuring leaderships of Adenauer, Erhard and Kiesinger.

Specifically, if the need to obtain political power with a democratic parliamentary majority meant converting the SPD from a "class-party" to a "people's party", the result would be to blur the inherent conflict of interests between labour and capital, and involve transforming the two sides in a wages negotiation into "social partners".

[28] It must be acknowledged that despite the vehemence with which he opposed the Godesberg changes and the differences of opinion involved, Brenner refused to infer any conflict of interest between the SPD and the trades unions.

Between Social Democracy and the free trades union movement in West Germany there existed an "organic solidarity" firmly entrenched in shared underlying interests.

When they passed the so-called "Basic Law" (provisional constitution) in 1949, the legislators had left out any comprehensive regulation in respect of a potential emergency situation concerning the reservation of rights to the allied occupying powers.

A succession of West German governments set to work to make good the earlier omission, but every draft proposal for incorporating provision of "emergency acts" in the constitution involved drastic curtailments of fundamental human rights.

West Germany remained a "capitalist class-based society": the role of the trades unions in defending the positions of working people was an important one.

Just as he compared the proposed "emergency acts" with the infamous Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, he recalled the greatest general strike in German history, which the unions had organised in 1920 (as requested by some government ministers) to defend the young republic against the Kapp Putsch.

[8] Otto Brenner always believed that there was a residual latent danger of Fascism in the German Federal Republic (West Germany), not because he feared a National Socialist revival in the state formed under Adenauer during the 1950s.

[1][34] Werner Thönnessen, his former presschief, contributed an obituary to Der Spiegel: "achieving Civil democracy 'by democratising the economy became Brenner's greatest objective.