Dorothee von Velsen

Dorothee von Velsen (born November 29, 1883 in Zabrze (now Poland ), † May 16, 1970 in Kochel am See ) was a German writer and suffragette.

Live and act

Dorothee von Velsen was the second of three daughters of the royal chief miner Gustav von Velsen (1847–1923) and Anna Loerbroks (1856–1910). She spent her childhood and youth in Upper Silesia , Saarland , Halle (Saale) and finally in Berlin . She led the usual life of a senior daughter at the time , attended boarding school, traveled a lot and took part in cultural events. After her mother's death, she ran the household for the father.

Unsatisfied with her situation, she decided to train at the social school for women founded by Alice Salomon . There she came into contact with the bourgeois women's movement , including Gertrud Bäumer , Helene Lange , Anna Pappritz , Helene Weber , Ricarda Huch and Marianne Weber , with whom she had a special friendship. From then on, she devoted a large part of her labor to the women's movement.

During the First World War , von Velsen initially worked for the National Women's Service in Berlin . After a stopover in the General Government of Belgium in the civil administration, where she set up a welfare department in Brussels under General Moritz von Bissing together with Marie-Elisabeth Lüders , she took over the women's department at the War Office in Wroclaw in 1917 . Towards the end of the war, she moved to occupied Ukraine under General Wilhelm Groener as an officer in an army group .

During the Weimar Republic she took over the management of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine as well as the management of a committee of the German Democratic Party , for which she was also involved in the election campaign - forced to do wage labor due to inflation . She was a member of the DDP and, since 1921, chairwoman of the German Union of Citizens . She made trips abroad including England, France, Turkey and the United States. She also belonged to a German delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva.

In addition to these activities, she continued to work as a journalist for the women's movement. An article for the magazine Die Frau from 1923, which bears the title About friendship , is considered in historical women and gender studies as

Of particular interest because Velsen not only establishes a connection between friendship with women and the emancipation goals of the women's movement, but also because between the lines she also addresses the conflicting interpretative patterns of feminist tradition formation and sexual science categorization, which primarily revolve around the subject of physical experience and sexuality turn, in other words: about the classification of same-sex relationships in the contemporary grid of homo- and heterosexuality.

From 1925 von Velsen studied economics and history at the universities in Berlin and Heidelberg and received his doctorate in history in 1931.

In 1933, Dorothee von Velsen withdrew from active politics and lived in seclusion in Upper Bavaria in Kochel am See during the Nazi era. From then on she worked as a literary artist, preferring to devote herself to historical subjects. However, their political interest remained unbroken. So she engaged in a lively argument with Gertrud Bäumer about her decision to continue publishing her magazine Die Frau after 1933 . She repeatedly argued that the price that Bäumer paid to the National Socialist rulers in the form of editorial and content-related concessions was too high, and that Bäumer was countering the goals of the women's movement by continuing to publish it and ultimately playing into the hands of the National Socialists.

Dorothee von Velsen was a founding member of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in 1958 . From 1959 to 1969 she was a member of the Board of Trustees .

Dorothee von Velsen's estate is stored in the Berlin State Archives and in the archive of the German women's movement .

Works (selection)

• About friendship . In: Die Frau 1923, H. 12, P. 367-374.
• The Counter Reformation in the principalities of Liegnitz-Brieg-Wohlau. Their history and their constitutional basis. Heinsius, Leipzig 1931 (= sources and research on the history of the Reformation , vol. 15).
• The royal children. Heirs of the houses of Habsburg-Burgundy . Bott, Berlin 1937.
• The golden gate . Diederichs, Jena 1939.
• The Count Mercy. A life fighting for Germany's borders. Diederichs, Jena 1943.
• We live for a while . Wunderlich, Tübingen / Stuttgart 1950.
• On the draft of a family law in the Soviet-occupied zone . In: Mädchenbildung und Frauenschaffen , 1955, no. 5, pp. 427–431.
• Abundance in old age. Memories . Wunderlich, Tübingen 1956.
• Helene Lange, 1848–1930. In: Hermann Heimpel , Theodor Heuss , Benno Reifenberg (Hrsg.): The great Germans. German biography. Vol. 4, Propylaea-Verl. in Ullstein, Berlin 1957, pp. 175-185.

literature

• Marie-Elisabeth Lüders : Dorothee von Velsen. Try to get a picture of life. A tribute to her 80th birthday on November 29, 1963 . o. O.
• Mirjam Höfner: 'Cosmopolitan' Interventions. Dorothee von Velsen (1883–1970) and the internationalization of the German women's movement in the Weimar Republic . In: Ariadne. Forum for Women's and Gender History , No. 73–74, July 2018, pp. 82–89.
• Carme Bescansa Leirós: Dorothee von Velsen y la crisis de su mundo. En la novela Vivimos un tiempo (1950) , Entimema, Madrid 2012.

Web links

• Literature by and about Dorothee von Velsen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Federal archive, estate database nachlassdatenbank.de
• Article, Spanish with German summary (PDF; 241 kB).
• Spiritual, but not exciting . In: Die Zeit , No. 14/1956.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 483.
2. ↑ Dorothee von Velsen: In old age the abundance . Tübingen 1956, p. 116 f.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Margit Göttert: Power and Eros. Women's relationships and female culture around 1900 - a new perspective on Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer . Königstein / Taunus 2000, p. 188.
4. ↑ Angelika Schaser : Gertrud Bäumer - "one of the wildest democrats" or "prevented National Socialist"? In: Kirsten Heinsohn , Barbara Vogel , Ulrike Weckel (eds.): Between career and persecution. Spaces of action for women in National Socialist Germany . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 24–43.
5. ↑ landesarchiv-berlin.de ( Memento of the original from October 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ On the holdings of the archive of the German women's movement ( memento of the original from March 15, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.