Margaret Adam

Margarete Adam (born July 13, 1885 ; † late January 1946 in Berlin ) was a German philosopher and university professor.

Life

Adam came from a German national family and was a devout Catholic. She studied philosophy and received her doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1925 . Your doctoral supervisor was Ernst Cassirer , whose chair was withdrawn in 1933 because of his Jewish origins. In December 1930 Adam wrote an essay in the brochure of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith . In it she examined the history of the “Jewish question”, described herself as a “philosopher” and condemned the anti-Semitism of National Socialism . Although they recognized the danger, the state disenfranchisement of the Jews was unthinkable. In an afterword, she confessed to having elected the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections on September 14, 1930 . She voted for the party not because of, but in spite of its anti-Semitism , because it was the only one that had set itself the goal of revising the Versailles Treaty and the fight against corruption and Bolshevism . There are, however, anti-Semitic statements by Adam. She stated: "The Aryans perceive the Jew as essentially a different person." She also wrote about the "Jewish press" and "their cheekiness and cheekiness about great personalities of the German past". She dubbed the practice of the Weimar Republic of making higher civil servant positions accessible to citizens of the Jewish faith as an “experiment contrary to history”.

Memorial stone for Margarete Adam in the women's garden

In 1933, her teaching post at the University of Hamburg was withdrawn and she decided to resist . In the first years of the regime she tried in vain to bring those responsible for the Röhm putsch to justice. She wrote letters and leaflets which she addressed to Reichswehr officers and well-known personalities in order to persuade them to overthrow Adolf Hitler . Adam was arrested in 1937 for high treason accused and to eight years in prison convicted. First she was placed in solitary confinement in the women's prisons in Lübeck- Lauerhof and Cottbus . In 1944 she was relocated to Roßthal near Dresden due to her incapacity for detention and later taken to the Berlin Charité . In the last days of January 1946 she died of the consequences of imprisonment.

A stone has been placed in the memory spiral in the garden of the women of the Ohlsdorf cemetery in her memory .

swell

• Women's garden e. V., Stones of Remembrance , updated January 2011
• Jana Leichsenring, Women and Resistance , Series of the Research Association July 20, 1944 e. V., LIT Verlag Münster 2003, ISBN 3-8258-6489-8 , p. 14

Web links

• Kirsten Heinsohn , Barbara Vogel, Ulrike Weckel: Between career and persecution . Campus Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-593-35756-9 , p. 247/248.