Alma Kettig

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Alma Kettig (born November 5, 1915 in Barmen ; † August 5, 1997 in Wuppertal ) was a German SPD politician , resistance fighter against National Socialism , trade unionist and peace activist.

Life and work

Alma Kettig grew up in a social democratic family. After attending elementary school, she learned the stenographer's profession at the municipal business school in Wuppertal-Barmen, in which she also worked for public welfare and other insurance companies until 1938 . She then worked as an accountant and office manager until 1946. Then she worked as a secretary in Witten . After leaving the Bundestag, Alma Kettig worked as a freelance journalist.

Political activities

When the SPD parliamentary group in the German Reichstag approved the construction of armored cruisers in 1931, her mother left the SPD and joined the Socialist Workers' Party (SAP) . Her father and a sister remained in the SPD, one brother became a member of the KPD . Alma Kettig was involved in the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) , which she joined in 1929. There they went on a journey, but also posted posters and distributed leaflets, for example against the emergence of National Socialism. She remembered the last demonstration by the Nazi opponents in Wuppertal on January 30, 1933 as “a powerful joint demonstration by all leftists, unfortunately much too late. But it gave us the feeling of togetherness and solidarity. ”After the rally, SA stormed the Kettig family's apartment and confiscated books and other writings. The father was arrested for removing SA slogans from shop windows. After his release, he was transferred to a sentence. Brother Otto lost his job at the local health insurance fund.

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP and its allies, Alma Kettig took part in resistance activities, carried out messenger services to pass on messages and smuggled letters. After their SAJ group was evicted from the city youth home with whips and dogs, the group met illegally. In 1934 her brother went into hiding, in 1936 he was arrested and imprisoned in Bremen. Out of consideration for her mother, who had meanwhile become ill, and for fear of arrest, she now gave up her conspiratorial work.

In 1945 she joined the SPD, her main focus here were women's, social and peace policy. In 1945 she was elected to the women's officer of her party in the Recklinghausen district , in 1946 to the district committee of the Young Socialists and to the district women's committee at IG Chemie-Papier-Keramik . Since 1952 she was one of four women in the city parliament in Witten. In 1953 and then in 1957 she was elected for Witten in the German Bundestag , where she believed she could establish that “the really political things, judicial committee, foreign policy, economy” were firmly in the hands of the “masters of creation”.

Within the SPD, Kettig belonged to the left wing and to the opponents of rearmament . "Eradicating Nazism, annihilating militarism and building a socialist society" were her goals, she later explained. Her biographer Gisela Notz describes her as a “left-wing socialist in the German Bundestag”. When remilitarization was resolved on March 6, 1956 in the Bundestag with an amendment to the Basic Law and 50 SPD MPs stayed away from the vote, she was one of the 19 who voted “No”. She later commented that the SPD had "given up all the basic lines on which social democratic, German and international politics in 1945 had been built". There should have been “cooperation and not confrontation”. After the SPD turned against nuclear armament in the campaign Fight against Nuclear Death , but had lost the federal election in 1957 , it gave up its resistance, which Alma Kettig did not support. In the subsequent dispute over the emergency laws , she voted in 1965 together with eleven other SPD MPs and, in the absence of many others, against their passing. Chained qualified approval and non-participation as “thinking in unison”. She was the only member of the parliamentary group to vote against the defense budget. Her party put pressure on her to give up her seat in the Bundestag. Federal Interior Minister Hermann Höcherl accused them of having passed on confidential information to the German Peace Union (DFU) or to GDR authorities . Your phone was tapped. Kettig denied the allegations. In an expert report, the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service stated in 2013 that it was not possible to determine whether Kettig had been “skimmed off” or whether she had “consciously passed on information to whomever”, nor could “anything about the content and Say the extent of the possible flow of information ”. She fell ill and resigned from all offices in the Bundestag shortly before the end of the legislative period in 1965. In 1970 she decided to join the West German women's peace movement.

When the WFFB lost all importance in the wake of the policy of détente and dissolved in the mid-1970s, Alma Kettig, Ingeborg Küster and Elly Steinmann initiated the Democratic Women's Initiative (DFI) together with women from the new women's movement and with trade unionists . The aim was to achieve “equality in a humane society”. It was about enforcing the right to work and equal pay for women, but also, in terms of peace policy, about preventing women from being recruited for the Bundeswehr.

Kettig was unemployed for three years after leaving the Bundestag. Then she worked in wholesale. She was again unionized and until 1975 held functions at local and regional level in the chemical, paper and ceramic union . Nevertheless, she saw herself stigmatized there as a leftist. In the area of ​​the administrative office, too, there were officials who disagreed with their political opinion and who repeatedly made this clear. Nevertheless, she continued to work. Another area of ​​political activity was the movement against the Vietnam War . Alma Kettig turned against US politics, took part in panel discussions, wrote articles in various media and raised funds for aid to Vietnam in bazaars . As early as 1966, she was elected to the board of the West German regional association as a member of the German Peace Society (DFG) . At the same time she was active in the West German Women's Peace Movement (WFFB) and edited their magazine Frau und Frieden . Her main activity was on the subject of "Women in the Bundeswehr, we say no." She continued to be a volunteer functionary. In 1983 she was elected deputy federal chairman of the German Freethinkers Association.

literature

  • Stefan Appelius (Ed.): Alma Kettig. Commitment to peace. Biography of a member of the Bundestag , Oldenburg 1999, ISBN 3-8142-0347-X ( full text ).
  • Gisela Notz : Alma Kettig. In: same: women in the team. Bonn 2003, pp. 264-282, ISBN 3-8012-4131-9 .
  • Working group literature in the world of work : The children of the red grandfather tell stories. Reports on the prehistory and early history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Frankfurt / Main 1976, pp. 232-245.
  • Gisela Notz: Left Socialist in the Bundestag: Alma Kettig (1915–1997) , in: Christoph Jünke (Ed.): Left Socialism in Germany. Beyond social democracy and communism? Hamburg 2010, pp. 106–123

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ All information, unless otherwise stated: Gisela Notz, Alma Kettig (1915–1997). A pacifist in Germany, in: SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung, May 2003, p. 18.
  2. ↑ Gisela Notz, Women in the Team: Social Democrats in the Parliamentary Council and in the German Bundestag 1948/49 to 1957: with 26 biographies, Berlin 2003, p. 270.
  3. ↑ Gisela Notz, Left Socialist in the Bundestag: Alma Kettig (1915–1997), in: Christoph Jünke (Ed.), Left Socialism in Germany: Beyond Social Democracy and Communism ?, Hamburg 2010, pp. 106–123, here: p. 106 .
  4. ^ Gisela Notz, Alma Kettig (1915–1997). A pacifist in Germany, in: SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung, May 2003, p. 18.
  5. ^ BStU : The German Bundestag 1949 to 1989 in the files of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR. Report to the German Bundestag in accordance with Section 37 (3) of the Stasi Records Act, Berlin 2013, pp. 219f. ( PDF ( Memento of November 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive )).
  6. ↑ Florence Hervé , Fast Forget - The Women's Peace Movement in the FRG, in: Federal Center for Political Education (Ed.), Dossier Women's Movement, November 11, 2008, see: [1] .
  7. ↑ Florence Hervé , Fast Forget - The Women's Peace Movement in the FRG, in: Federal Center for Political Education (Ed.), Dossier Women's Movement, November 11, 2008, see: [2] .
  8. ↑ Helga Julien, Alma Kettig's women and peace work, see: [3] , p. 142.
personal data
SURNAME Chain, Alma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD), Member of the Bundestag, resistance fighter against National Socialism, peace activist and trade unionist
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Barmen
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1997
Place of death Wuppertal