Emily Rosdolsky

Emily Rosdolsky in conversation with Fritz Keller

Emily Rosdolsky , b. Meder (born June 2, 1911 in Vienna ; † September 3, 2001 in Vienna ) was an Austrian Marxist , active anti-fascist , trade union activist and women's rights activist . In the narrower political sense, it tended towards Trotskyism .

In the interwar period she was active in the Communist Party of Austria and in the resistance against Austro-Fascism and against National Socialism , which is why she was imprisoned for two months in 1934 and for three weeks in 1942. In 1947 she fled with her husband Roman and their son Hans (1943–2013) from the Stalinists to the USA , where she worked as a union advisor until 1971. Emily Rosdolsky then lived in Vienna until her death in 2001 and was politically involved in the memorial movement and in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance . In Vienna she sympathized with the Trotskyist group Revolutionary Marxists and wrote two articles on the victims of Stalinism. She was also the author of the (largely anonymous) forewords in the various publications of her husband and fellow campaigner Roman Rosdolsky .

Youth and Political Beginnings (1911–1932)

Early boyfriend and comrade Emily Meders, her later husband Roman Rosdolsky , in the USA around 1960

Emily Meder joined the Association of Socialist Middle Schools (VSM) as a 14-year-old high school student in 1925 , the former student organization of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of German Austria (SDAPDÖ). At the age of 16, she met her future husband, the Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky , on July 15, 1927, during the demonstrations that led to the Vienna Justice Palace fire . The demonstration marches by social democratic workers from Vienna's outskirts into the inner city and the subsequent fire in the Vienna Palace of Justice were directed against the unexpected acquittal of three front-line fighters accused of murdering a Schutzbundler ( see: Heimwehr ) in the Schattendorfer judgment . The events are also referred to as the Vienna July Revolt and represented the first resistance against the burgeoning Austrofascism . When the Republican Protection Association (SDAPÖ) was used against "wild demonstrators", Emily Meder switched from the social democratic VSM to the Communist Youth Association (KJV). In 1928 she joined the KPÖ . Although she lived in Vienna- Alsergrund (9th  district ), she was active in Brigittenau (20th district) because it was “an attractive proletarian district” for her.

After graduating from high school in 1929, Meder moved to the KPÖ cell in the 9th district ( Lichtental ), where she worked with Roman Rosdolsky. In an interview she reported that around 15 people were present on cell evenings. Emily Meder was the responsible editor of the company newspaper Der Rote Franz-Josephs-Bahner and fought together with Roman Rosdolsky and others for a " revolutionary trade union opposition " based on the model of the German section of the Red Union International . In her role as editor-in-chief of a communist company newspaper, Emily Meder had her first summons to the police.

Well-known opposition figures were active in the KPÖ cell in the 9th district, such as Martha Nathanson, who openly appeared as a Trotskyist, or Hans Selackek, a supporter of the right-wing group around Heinrich Brandler . The Trotskyist Roman Rosdolsky is said to have argued there with supporters of Brandler and Loyal Stalinists . Meder was also with Dr. Isidor Fassler known, one of the first Austrian Trotskyists. Fassler was murdered by the National Socialists .

Roman Rosdolsky had great political influence on Emily Meder and other members of the KPÖ. Among other things, he persuaded Meder to read Leon Trotsky's writings on National Socialism. According to her own statement, she was also "very strongly influenced" by Roman Rosdolsky in criticizing the politics of the German KPD and its social fascism thesis , according to which the main opponents of the communists were not so much the National Socialists as the Social Democrats .

Civil War and the Anschluss of Austria (1933–1938)

The KPÖ was banned in 1933 under Engelbert Dollfuss with the establishment of the Austro-Fascist corporate state . During the Austrian civil war around February 12, 1934, Emily Meder and her comrades in the 9th district published and distributed self-made leaflets, but felt completely isolated from the illegal KPÖ. When Meder met at the beginning of March with a group of the Red Hawks who wanted to join the Communist Youth Association, she was arrested together with twelve fellow soldiers and taken to the police station.

After the victory of the Heimwehr and the Federal Army over the Social Democratic Schutzbund in February 1934, Roman Rosdolsky had to flee Austria from Vienna to his former home in Lemberg . Emily Meder remained in custody until May 8, 1934. Since then she has been under police supervision. As a result, she could no longer work within the KPÖ and no longer had any contact with the party. Instead, she moved closer to the Trotskyist movement and took part in Trotskyist meetings with Kurt Bettelheim , whom she knew from the socialist middle school and student movement. At Bettelheim's, among other things, she read Trotsky's book Revolution Betrayed . At this time a lively correspondence began with Roman Rosdolsky in Lemberg, which also influenced her political convictions.

Emily Meder played a leading role in founding Ziel und Weg , an opposition magazine in the Communist Youth Association. The target and pathway group was for a time entristisch in KJV operates excluded until their members and in the KJV newspaper proletarian youth were defamed as "possible Home Guards, Nazis or police spies". Nevertheless, the group continued to publish the newspaper Ziel und Weg . However, there was no contact with the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communists , an opposition group that also worked in the Communist Youth Association around 1935.

Emily Meder described the essential alignment of goal and path , a joint project by left and right oppositionists, as follows:

“ We sympathized with the POUM during the Spanish Civil War . We were against the red-white-red orientation of the KPÖ - we were skeptical of the slogan of an Austrian nation and were of the opinion that one should rely on an all-German revolution. We considered the popular front policy in France to be unprincipled. The 'goal and path' group has cautiously but nevertheless commented on the Moscow trials . "

Emily Meder received her doctorate in law in 1937 . During the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938, she finally joined the Trotskyist movement. Regarding the positioning of her group in relation to National Socialism in Austria before the seizure of power in 1938, she reported:

"We condemned the attitude of the Communist Party at that time - the attitude towards Schuschnigg and the cooperation with the Fatherland Front - and we published our own leaflets."

Even after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich on 12/13. March 1938, the KPÖ cell of the 9th district had an illegal conference of officials in the Vienna Woods , in which Emily Meder took part. She reported that the later KPÖ General Secretary Friedl Fürnberg (1902–1978), at that time the Central Committee and management member of the KPÖ, had taken the view that the National Socialists could only stay in power in Austria for six weeks, at most six months. Roman Rosdolsky was very resolute in opposing the KPÖ leadership's assertion that the Nazi seizure of power would only be a temporary defeat.

Emigration and persecution by National Socialism (1939–1944)

Roman Rosdolsky asked his comrade Emily Meder at the time if she “doesn't even want to breathe another air” and invited her to Lviv, Poland. When she visited Rosdolsky in December 1938, Meder received the message from her comrades that she should “if possible not return to Austria” because of the strong repression. Emily Meder stayed in Lviv and finally married Roman Rosdolsky there in February 1939. Emily Rosdolsky was no longer politically active in Lviv because she spoke neither Ukrainian nor Polish .

In September 1939, Lemberg was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR as a result of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . When it became known that “the city would be occupied by the Russians”, Emily and Roman Rosdolsky fled to Krakow , fearing Stalinist persecution because “Roman had declared himself a Trotskyist in the city”. At that time Krakow was already under German occupation and was the capital of the General Government of Poland , but the city seemed safer to the Rosdolskys than Lemberg. In Krakow, Emily Rosdolsky worked as a secretary at Dresdner Bank and helped "give some people a job" with a small workshop that produced rice straw brushes. The Rosdolskys lived in the Jewish suburb of Kazimierz at Dietlstrasse No. 62 with a Jewish merchant.

Finally, in September 1942, both were arrested by the Gestapo for having sheltered Jews with them. Emily Rosdolsky, who was heavily pregnant at the time, was released after three weeks. The historian Fritz Keller suspects that her release from prison was due to the help of “an anti-Nazi Gestapo man”. In December 1942, Emily Rosdolsky returned to Vienna, where she stayed despite the constant risk of war imprisonment. Later she went to Upper Austria because of the bombings in Vienna and lived there until she emigrated to the USA in autumn 1947. Roman Rosdolsky was deported from Cracow to Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1943 - a few months after their son Hans was born in January .

Post-war period and emigration to the USA (1945–1970)

After the war, Emily Rosdolsky worked for the Linz Chamber of Labor as a youth protection secretary and education officer. After Karl Fischer , an employee and like-minded colleague of Emily Rosdolsky, was kidnapped by Soviet agents "from the Chamber of Labor in Urfahr at the zone border " (the zone border was the Nibelungen Bridge ) and deported to a gulag in Siberia , the family emigrated Rosdolsky in the fall to the United States .

Emily Rosdolsky worked for 23 years - until her return to Vienna in 1971 - as a consultant in the research department of the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union of automobile workers in the AFL-CIO , at the headquarters of the UAW in Detroit . Her husband Roman Rosdolsky could not find work as a well-known communist during the McCarthy era . He was refused a university post, which is why he subsequently worked as a private lecturer. Emily Rosdolsky conducted research at the UAW on, among other things, productivity in the automotive sector. The UAW has been one of the largest trade unions in North America since its inception , representing workers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico . The UAW research division where Emily Rosdolsky worked reports directly to the international president. The responsibilities of the research department - and thus one of the areas of activity of Emily Rosdolsky - include assisting the union in collective bargaining by examining company finances and comparing them with other companies in the same industry, evaluating contractual commissions such as profit-sharing plans , organizing campaigns, collecting and examining information on company history, including dealing with unions, employment, earnings trends and the like, examining public policy proposals, and taking union initiatives. Every two months the department publishes a journal called Research Bulletin , in which Emily Rosdolsky also wrote.

Emily Rosdolsky saw her work in the UAW as political activity. For example, she intervened in a long dispute between working-class women and socialist feminists , which had already been controversially discussed in Copenhagen in 1910 at the Second International Socialist Women's Conference - at which the first Sunday in March was designated International Women's Day : the question of the prohibition of the Night work for women.

While at the beginning of the 1960s the majority of the trade unions in the USA advocated state health and safety measures for women, the UAW began to question this position in terms of gender equality . Women had the "freedom," it was said, "to accept the sometimes heavy burdens that come with such equality." This position led to solidarity from the US Women's Bureau with the UAW. At the time, Emily Rosdolsky was on the international staff of the auto workers union and, along with members of the UAW Women's Committee of the Dodge Union in Hamtramck , Michigan (UAW Local 3), criticized the official position of their union. They continued to support strong legal limits on working hours and argued that women needed protection in the area of working hours .

Return to Vienna (1971–2001)

Emily Rosdolsky returned to Vienna in 1971, four years after the death of her husband. There she worked as a volunteer for the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance . Although she was no longer politically active in Vienna, she remained politically interested and followed the politics and discussions within the Revolutionary Marxists Group (GRM), the Austrian section of the Fourth International . In 1977 Emily Rosdolsky and Fritz Keller wrote an article on the Vienna Trotskyist Trials in 1937 in the GRM newspaper rotfront . The forewords to many of her husband's writings were also by Emily Rosdolsky, and she wrote a contribution to Roman Rosdolsky's life in studies on revolutionary tactics .

After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc , Emily Rosdolsky was actively involved in the Austrian memorial movement in memory of the victims of Stalinism. In 1990 she wrote a biography about Franz Koritschoner , 1918 co-founder and first chairman of the KPÖ. Koritschoner was murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp after he had been extradited to the Gestapo as a German citizen by the NKVD as part of the Hitler-Stalin pact .

Emily Rosdolsky died on September 3, 2001 at the age of 90 in Vienna.

Works

• Fritz Keller , Emmy Rosdolsky: 40 Years of Trotskyist Trials in Vienna . In: Group Revolutionary Marxists (ed.): Rotfront . No. 8-9 . Vienna 1977.
• Emily Rosdolsky: Franz Koritschoner . In: Memorial (ed.): Austrian victims of Stalin . Vienna 1990, p. 69-76 .

literature

• Fritz Keller: Against the Current - factional struggles in the KPÖ, Trotskyists and other groups 1919–1945 . Europa Verlag, Vienna 1978 (contains biographical data on various personalities mentioned in the article).
• Fritz Keller: Alfred Klahr in Auschwitz concentration camp . Interview with Emmy Rosdolsky . In: Documentation archive of Austrian resistance (ed.): Yearbook 1998 . Self-published, Vienna 1998, p. 69-72 .
• Peter Cardorff: Man without a rope. Roman Rosdolsky on his hundredth birthday . In: Analysis & Criticism . No. 416 . Hamburg July 2, 1998, p. 32-33 (The article is based on long discussions with Emily Rosdolsky, who also verified the facts).
• Fritz Keller: Emily Rosdolsky died . In: Association for solidarity perspectives [VsP] (ed.): SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung . No. 22 . Hamburg October 25, 2001, p. 15 ( vsp-vernetzt.de [accessed on July 13, 2008]).
• Rosdolsky Circle: With permanent greetings. Life and work of Emmy and Roman Rosdolsky . Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry on the Vienna Justizpalastbrand. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Interview by Fritz Keller with Emily Rosdolsky on June 7, 1983.
3. ^ Fritz Keller: Against the Current - factional struggles in the KPÖ, Trotskyists and other groups 1919–1945 . Europa Verlag , Vienna 1978.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Fritz Keller Emily Rosdolsky dies . In: SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung , No. 22, October 25, 2001, p. 15.
5. ^ Roman Rosdolsky : The Jewish Orphanage in Krakow, February 17, 1948 . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna April 15, 1948, p. 2 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
6. ↑ Karl Fischer was a founding member of the Revolutionary Communists of Austria (RKÖ), who turned away from Trotskyism, and together with Ernst Federn , Marcel Beaufrere and Florent Galloy, author of the Buchenwald International Communist Manifesto ( 4th International ) of April 20, 1945.
   Declaration of the internationalist communists Buchenwald ("Buchenwald Manifesto"). ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2012 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. Marxist Initiative, April 20, 1945, accessed September 3, 2016. 
7. ^ Fritz Keller: In the GULAG from East and West. Karl Fischer, worker and revolutionary . International Socialist Publications, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 103 ff. (The part that deals with the deportation in the book is an autobiographical, unfinished manuscript by Karl Fischer.)
8. ↑ The full name (as of 2015) is International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America , cf. UAW: Who we are ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2015 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. 
9. ↑ See Letter from Emily Rosdolsky to Raymond H. Berndt . October 24, 1963, UAW President's Office: Walter Reuther Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University , Box 168, folder 7). (See also The Studebaker-Packard Corporation and the Origins of ERISA ; reviewed June 1, 2008)
10. ↑ See UAW: Departments Under the International President ( Memento of the original from July 16, 2015 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. 
11. ↑ Cf. Gerd Callesen : The International Socialist Women's Conferences. In: Sources on the Development of the Socialist International (1907–1919). Library of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , accessed on September 3, 2016 : “Danish and Swedish delegates advocated a resolution against the ban on night work for adult women and instead called for a 'ban on night work for both men and women' . This resolution was rejected by a majority, with Clara Zetkin and Nina Bang in particular speaking out against it. " 
12. ↑ UAW Local 3: Represented the workers of the Dodge Main Plant in Hamtramck, Michigan; one of the largest company unions in the United States at the time. The union was a gathering point for dissidents within the UAW, organized many important activities of the UAW and was the birthplace of Afro-American Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM; dt. Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement ). See UAW Local 3 Collection in the UAW Archives at Wayne State University .
13. ↑ Dennis A. Deslippe: Rights not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80 . University of Illinois Press, Champaign (Illinois) 2000, pp. 125 (English, excerpt from Google Books [accessed January 1, 2008]): “Emily Rosdolsky of the international staff and members of the Local 3 women's committee challenged their labor organization's position in support of repealing hours limitations laws by arguing that women needed protection in the area of ​​working hours. They pressed, however, for their integration into 'male' jobs closed to them. "
14. ^ Fritz Keller, Emmy Rosdolsky: 40 Years of Trotskyist Trials in Vienna . In: Group Revolutionary Marxists (ed.): Rotfront , No. 8–9, Vienna, 1977.
15. ↑ Emily Rosdolsky: Franz Koritschoner . In: Memorial (editor): Austrian victims of Stalin . Vienna 1990, pp. 69-76.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 15, 2008 .