Gertrud Baer

Gertrud Baer

Gertrud Baer (born November 25, 1890 in Halberstadt ; died December 15, 1981 in Geneva ) was a German women's rights activist and peace activist .

Life

Baer was the eldest daughter of the metal goods wholesaler Gustav Baer (1860-1937) and his wife Sara, born Stern (1866-1943). Her father came from an educated middle class family from Halberstadt, which had also produced doctors and teachers. The mother came from Hamburg , her father was the chief rabbi Ansel Stern (1820–1888). Gertrud's younger siblings were Erna (1892–1967), Walter (born 1894), Harriet (1896–1956) and Jeanette Baer (1903–1944), with whom she grew up in Hamburg, where her father settled.

Gertrud Baer studied languages ​​and international law in Germany, Switzerland and the USA , and worked among other things as a teacher and journalist. In the 1910s she worked briefly in the Hamburg women's center, which was founded by Lida Gustava Heymann around 1900 . She had already come into contact with the women's and peace movement through her mother. Together with Heymann, Anita Augspurg , Frida Perlen and other women, she represented her pacifist ideals during the First World War and beyond; During this time she moved to Munich and worked as a women's representative for the Ministry of Social Affairs in the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic . In 1921 she joined the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom (IFFF). In 1924, along with Perlen and Naima Sahlbom , she issued a call to scientists not to put their work into the service of the military; she was equally critical of communist and national socialist ideas. She became the chair of the German IFFF section. From 1929 to 1946 she was co-president of the IFFF (the office had previously been held by Jane Addams ; from 1929 onwards, on an equal footing with Baer, Clara Ragaz and Emily Greene Balch ). From 1933 she had to continue her work in exile in Switzerland. From 1940 until the end of the war she lived in New York . During her tenure, she was also the editor of the magazine “Pax et Libertas”, which appeared six times a year as an IFFF information sheet.

From 1945 she represented the IFFF and the International League for Human Rights in Geneva at the United Nations .

In 1977/78 the aspiring director Michaela Belger shot the documentary film Gertrud Baer - A Life for Equal Rights for Women, for Peace and Freedom , in which Baer appeared as a contemporary witness of the women's and peace movement and the Nazi era. Baer died childless and single in 1981.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stolpersteine ​​Hamburg: Biography of the sister Jeanette Baer , who was murdered in Auschwitz.
2. ↑ Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin: Peace - Freedom - Violence (freedom). Anita Augsburg, Lida Gustava Heymann, Helene Stöcker and Gertrud Baer in exile in Switzerland. In: Exil im Krieg (1939-1945) Osnabrück 2016, pp. 13–26. Digitized
3. ^ Ute Gerhard : Unheard of. The history of the German women's movement. Reinbek 1990. ISBN 3-49-918377-3 .