Charlotte Bischoff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marie Martha Charlotte Bischoff (born October 5, 1901 in Schöneberg as Charlotte Wielepp , † November 4, 1994 in Berlin ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Wielepp was born in her parents' apartment at 13 Apostel-Paulus-Straße. Her father was Alfred Wielepp (1878–1948), who was the editor in charge of Vorwärts before the First World War . Her mother was Martha Albertine geb. Stawitzky. After attending a commercial school, Charlotte Wielepp worked as an office clerk and typist in Halle , Hamburg and Berlin from 1915 to 1930 . From 1918 onwards she was a member of the Free Socialist Youth and the Communist Youth Association of Germany , and in 1923 she joined the KPD . In the same year she married Fritz Bischoff , a founding member of the KPD, who at that time worked as a commercial clerk in the Soviet trade agency. Since 1930 Charlotte Bischoff was a typist and clerk in the Prussian parliamentary group and in the central committee of the KPD.

After the National Socialists came to power, Bischoff initially worked for the information department of the illegal KPD. In December 1933 she went to Moscow with her daughter Renate (1924-2018), where she worked for the International Relations Department of the Communist International until 1937 , which included trips abroad (Denmark and the Netherlands). Her husband was arrested by the National Socialists in 1934, sentenced to eight years in prison and later taken to the Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme concentration camps ; he was finally shot by the SS on May 3, 1945 when he tried to escape from the Cap Arcona .

In 1938 she applied to be allowed to work illegally in Germany and was initially sent to Stockholm , where the “North Section” of the KPD was located. She was arrested there in early 1939 as an illegal worker and threatened with deportation to Germany, but was soon released again. The German Reich then revoked her German citizenship. Bischoff now looked after emigrated German communists for the International Red Aid , collected money and discussed with unionized Swedish construction workers on construction sites.

In 1941, on behalf of the foreign leadership of the KPD, which was represented at the time by Herbert Wehner , she managed to enter Germany illegally by cargo ship - the journey lasted from June 29 to the end of July. Charlotte Bischoff worked in Berlin with various resistance groups, in particular with those around the Rote Kapelle , for example with the people around Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher , with the group around Wilhelm Knöchel and with the operational management groups of the KPD in Germany around the magazine Die Inner front and around Anton Saefkow , Bernhard Bästlein and Robert Uhrig . She handed over to contact persons of these groups u. a. "Micromaterials" brought from Sweden. She was one of the few members of this resistance group who escaped arrest and remained undetected in Berlin until the end of the war . It is largely due to the work of Charlotte Bischoff, Otto Grabowski and Ernst Sieber that even after the arrest of numerous other resistance fighters, “The Inner Front” could still be produced and distributed.

After the war, Bischoff held various activities in the Free German Trade Union Federation of the GDR and became a member of the SED . At the end of September 1950, she succeeded Martha Arendsee as chairwoman of the Berlin Insurance Company . After disputes within the FDGB, she worked in the following years for “Sozialhilfe Groß-Berlin”, a welfare organization that was active throughout Berlin and was closely related to the SED. From 1957 she was a volunteer freelancer at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED . There she was involved in the elaboration of an official GDR “History of the German Labor Movement”; Her name appears repeatedly in this volume as "Commissioner of the Central Committee". Bischoff's notes and documents collected for this work remained unpublished during GDR times - as Eva-Maria Siegel suspects, because they contain “various corrections to the semi-official ideology of history”, especially with regard to the role of Karl Mewis .

At the age of 90, Charlotte Bischoff joined the PDS .

Awards

Appreciation

Peter Weiss comprehensively described the resistance activities of Charlotte Bischoff in exile and in Germany in his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance . Especially in the third volume of the novel, which tells of the circles around the Red Chapel , she is the central protagonist. Weiss relied on discussions with Bischoff in 1972 as well as on an exchange of letters with her between 1974 and 1976.

literature

  • Charlotte Bischoff estate at the Foundation Archive of Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR in the Federal Archives, NY 4232, edited by Max Bloch. Introduction and overview online at nachlassdatenbank.de
  • Eva-Maria Siegel: “You can recognize a woman by her smile.” Documents and comments on the relationship between fiction and authenticity in Peter Weiss' aesthetics of resistance using the example of Charlotte Bischoff . In: Peter Weiss Jahrbuch 5, Opladen 1996, pp. 37–69.
  • Simone Barck : Writing a resistance story “from below”: Charlotte Bischoff and Peter Weiss. In: dies .: Antifa story (s). A literary search for clues in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s. Böhlau, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2003, pp. 229–258.
  • Michael F. Scholz :  Bischoff, Charlotte . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Anne E. Dünzelmann : Walks in Stockholm: In the footsteps of German exiles 1933-1945 . Verlag Books on Demand, Norderstedt, ISBN 978-3-74482-995-3 , p. 61 ( limited preview in Google book search).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth register Schöneberg I No. 2105/1901 .
  2. ↑ Bischoff's handwritten curriculum vitae from 1961/1962, printed in Siegel 1996, p. 49.
  3. ^ Robert Cohen: Bio-Bibliographisches Handbuch zu Peter Weiss' "Aesthetics of Resistance". Berlin: Argument, 1989, p. 65.
  4. ↑ Accelerated pension processing . In: Neue Zeit , October 1, 1950, p. 7.
  5. ^ Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED: History of the German Workers' Movement. Volume 5: From January 1933 to May 1945. Berlin 1966.
  6. ^ Siegel 1996, p. 57.
personal data
SURNAME Bischoff, Charlotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bischoff, Charlotte Maria Martha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Schöneberg
DATE OF DEATH November 4, 1994
Place of death Berlin