No matter how deep the SPD was, it was always the strongest force in the Siebel family. Thursday afternoon in Gelsenkirchen-Feldmark, workers' district, former coal mining area, first vote in the last federal election: 38.3 percent. There is no more social democracy in Germany. But misleading numbers is not important to the Siebels, it's the family photo. Party books with it or not? The photographer is ready, time is short, and you also want to show what you have, so up with the books, one after the other, they hold them up like a treasure. Daniel Siebel and his wife, his sister, his parents, his grandmother, everyone has one with them. In some of them, 1974 is the first number or 1976, before the old member stamps and the pictures of great comrades. The party was entered as early as possible.And being a comrade is not an obligation here, in Gelsenkirchen-Feldmark it is a question of family honor. Already in the fourth generation.

Oliver Georgi

Editor in politics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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So how important is the parental home for what you choose later, how you think politically? “Look!” Says Daniel Siebel, 33, thin glasses, type of smart sun boy, and grins broadly. His job: auditor at the municipal utilities in Bottrop, his calling: politics, as deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Gelsenkirchen city council. Someone who still has something in mind - and who knows no other than to discuss things until everyone has an opinion. As usual, when both grandfathers were active trade unionists and SPD members, one even a district mayor, and the father puts the application for membership on the table on your 16th birthday with the words: Now is the time! “My parents never pushed me to do anything,” says Daniel Siebel, that is very important to all of them here: no peer pressure.But if you have so much SPD around you all the time, from morning to evening, you don't need to be pushed. He takes the same path on his own, which everyone in the family obviously thinks is the right one.

When the parents campaigned early, Daniel Siebel and his older sister Lena went with them, of course. They were only eight or nine years old, if only because grandpa made the raffle in the children's tent.

When Siebel played soccer with his buddies on the street, it was mostly with the balls from the big box in the garage with the red letters on them.

The SPD, with the Siebels, got under their skin so early on that at some point it was a natural part of them.

"I was first in the party and only then did I start to form my own political opinion," Siebel says today.

Discuss until everyone has an opinion

It was the same with his father Hans-Joachim, 62, and for many years the proud SPD local club chairman in Gelsenkirchen-Feldmark. He too campaigned with his father in 1972, when he was 13, to vote for Willy. Walked through the streets to put Willy Brandt stickers on CDU posters, fought as Juso against nuclear power, protested in the Bonn court garden with many others against Helmut Schmidt and the NATO double resolution. “I passed that on to my children, this commitment,” says Hans-Joachim Siebel today, “It was always important to me that they too start at the Jusos one day. That they learn to discuss. ”And there has always been enough discussion at Siebels. About the horrors of National Socialism, the “coalition of the willing” after September 11, 2001, about the 2003 Iraq war.And again and again about the participation of the SPD in the grand coalitions, when father and son, for a change, were of fundamentally different opinion: Daniel Siebel wanted out, his father in. But with the Siebels it is like a family with their SPD: it crunches sometimes, it sometimes hurts a lot, but that we belong together is out of the question.