Bertha Braunthal

Bertha Braunthal (married Clark , also Berta Braunthal- (Clark) ; born February 1, 1887 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † 1967 in London ) was a German politician ( KPD ) of Austrian origin and a functionary of the proletarian women's movement .

Life

Braunthal was born the daughter of a Jewish accountant . She was the older sister of the well-known socialists Alfred and Julius Braunthal . She was later married to William ("Willie") N. Clark, a Scottish Communist.

During the First World War she was employed as a commercial clerk in a factory in the Netherlands , then in Berlin . Braunthal, a member of the SDAPÖ before the World War , was a member of the Spartakusgruppe and the USPD in Berlin. She worked as a secretary in the Propaganda Department in the Executive Council of the Greater Berlin Workers and Soldiers Council . At the extraordinary party congress of the USPD in December 1919 in Leipzig , she was elected to the six-member secretariat of the Central Committee. From March 1920 she was secretary in charge of propaganda work among women. Braunthal belonged to the left wing of the USPD. She was an employee of the USPD women's newspaper The Fighters . At the split party conference in Halle (Saale) in October 1920 , she was elected to the four-member secretariat of the USPD Central Committee (Left). The delegates of the unification party congress of the KPD and USPD (Left) in Berlin in December 1920 elected Braunthal to the headquarters of the KPD and made her head of the women's secretariat (until 1923). In addition to Clara Zetkin , Hertha Sturm and Martha Arendsee , Bertha Braunthal worked on the editorial team of the magazine Die Kommunistin .

Braunthal participated in the II. International Communist Women's Conference in June 1921 and on the III. World Congress of the Comintern in late June / early July 1921 in Moscow . At the 7th party congress of the KPD in Jena in August 1921 and at the 8th party congress in 1923 (January 28 - February 1, 1923 in Leipzig ) she was re-elected to the headquarters of the KPD and entrusted with the management of the women's secretariat. She later worked with her husband in the editorial department of the Comintern magazine, Internationale Pressekorrespondenz (Inprekorr), headed by Gyula Alpári , in Berlin and was responsible for the publication of the English edition of Inprekorr . In 1933 she emigrated to London and worked for the weekly magazine World News and Views , the successor to the English-language Inprekorr . After the Comintern dissolved in 1943, she worked as a translator for the Communist Party of Great Britain .

Bertha Braunthal died in London in 1967.

literature

• Hans-Jürgen Arendt: The Reichsfrauensekretariat at the headquarters of the KPD (1919–1923) . In: Mitteilungsblatt der Forschungsgemeinschaft "History of the Struggle of the Working Class for the Liberation of Women", Issue 1 (1986), pp. 5–21.
• Gerhard Engel (Ed.): Great Berlin workers and soldiers councils in the revolution 1918/19. Documents of the plenary meetings and the executive council . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, pp. XIV and 179.
• Ilse Erika Korotin, Karin Nusko (ed.): "... experienced enough history". Hilde Koplenig (1904–2002): Memories (= New Results in Women's Biography Research , Volume 6). Praesens Verlag, Vienna 2008, p. 289.
• Braunthal, Bertha . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition Dietz, Berlin 2008.
• Braunthal, Bertha , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (eds.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 89

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see entry on: The Communist (PDF; 128 kB)
2. ↑ Irén Komját: The story of the Inprekorr. Newspaper of the Communist International (1921–1939) . Verlag Marxistische Blätter, Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 50f.