Charlotte Temming

Charlotte "Lotte" Temming (born April 4, 1903 in Aachen as Charlotte Herz; died September 19, 1984 in Dortmund ) was a German writer.

Life

Charlotte Temming was born on April 4, 1903 in Aachen as the daughter of the Jewish businessman Leopold Herz (* around 1860 - † 1943) and the housewife Zerline Salomon (* around 1870 - † 1935). The Herz couple had two more children: Richard (1900–1976), later a doctor in Israel, and Lili (* 1905), later a eurythmy therapist in Öschelbronn. After attending grammar school, she first learned to be a goldsmith in Nuremberg from 1921 . There she joined the Communist Youth and wrote her first poems. While doing Agitprop work, she met the graphic artist and typesetter Bernhard Temming , whom she married in Berlin in 1929. The couple moved to Dortmund, where Bernhard Temming found permanent employment. Together with her husband she had a son, the writer and producer Rolf L. Temming (* 1930; † 2019). Charlotte Temming joined the Dortmund local group of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers (BPRS) around Paul Polte and published her poems. She wrote texts for the political cabaret group Henkelmann , to which she belonged with her husband and Paul Polte.

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " she was imprisoned for a few days in the Dortmund Steinwache in her function as secretary of the BPRS . As the wife of an “Aryan” man, she was initially spared from deportations, but kept accompanying acquaintances to the assembly point in Steinstrasse for deportation to the concentration camps. Her father was murdered in a gas chamber by the National Socialists, as were around twenty other relatives. The siblings were able to flee to Israel and the Netherlands. In 1943 Charlotte Temming was drafted into the Stich sack factory, where only Jewish wives of Aryan men worked. Eventually she too received the order to be deported, which she resisted. During her escape, she received support from the communist resistance group around Martha Gillessen and found shelter in Velmede (now Bestwig). When the group was betrayed, Charlotte Temming escaped during the house search on February 8, 1945. She fled to the north of Dortmund and hid in a cellar until the American troops arrived.

After the Second World War, Charlotte Temming was a city councilor for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on the Dortmund city council from 1945 . She was a founding member of the city of Dortmund's women's committee. Charlotte Temming also campaigned for the construction of the Bittermark memorial . After a trip to the German Democratic Republic in 1959, she resigned from the KPD because she did not see her ideals realized there. After that she was no longer politically active. She made several trips to Israel.

Charlotte Temming died on September 19, 1984 at the age of 81 in Dortmund.

Services

Charlotte Temming began writing poetry at an early age. We have survived a poem that she wrote when she was twelve and in which she describes the painful death of a soldier in the First World War. With her entry into the Communist Youth, her poems received a clear message. The main topics are hunger during the Weimar Republic and its causes. In the early 1930s she pointed out the dangers of the rise of fascism. After the end of the Second World War, her poems focused primarily on the horrors of National Socialist rule and the needs in the post-war period.

In addition to poetry, she also published short narratives and educational articles in the 1950s. She also reported to school classes about the time under National Socialism.

Others

Her estate is located in the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World in Dortmund.

Works

• Charlotte Temming: proletarian poet and draftsman of the Ruhr area . No. 3 . Dortmund 1930 (single sheet print; with a lino print by Bernhard Temming).
• Charlotte Temming: Poems, written for the cabaret "Gruppe Henkelmann" . tape 1932/1933 .
• Supervision committee for concentration camp inmates (ed.): In memory of our dead. Murdered by the Gestapo in Rombergpark in March 1945 . Dortmund 1950.

literature

• Otfried Maul: The time of disaster. A Jewish woman reports on her life in the Third Reich . In: Ruhr news . Dortmund February 11th 1983.
• Ursula Lessing: Kassandra in the north of Dortmund . Women see women in the precinct. In: Women's department of the Evangelical Church of Westphalia (ed.): Actually, I was much more interested in the Ruhr area . Villigst June 1991, p. 32 f . (Brochure accompanying the exhibition Life Stories: Women See Women in the Revier).
• Günther Högl (Ed.): Resistance and persecution in Dortmund 1933–1945 . Catalog for the permanent exhibition in the Steinwache memorial. Dortmund 1992, p. 117, 124, 157 .
• Literature in everyday life. Workers, vagabonds, strollers and writers in Dortmund from 1930 to today . In: Gregor Vogt (Ed.): Information from the Fritz Hüser Institute for German and foreign workers' literature . No. 35/93 . Dortmund 1993, p. 18, 30 ff., 48 f .
• Martina Bracke: Paul, Lotte and the Henkelmann group - two writers and their cabaret 1930–1945 . In: Historical Association for Dortmund and the County of Mark (ed.): Home Dortmund . No. 2 . Dortmund City Archive , 2003, ISSN  0932-9757 , p. 27 f .

Web links

• Charlotte Temming in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• Information on Charlotte Temming in the project »Jewish writers in Westphalia« at the University of Paderborn

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Gregor Vogt: Temming, Charlotte (Lotte) . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 2 . Klartext, Essen 1998, ISBN 3-88474-677-4 , p. 116 ff .