Helene Kaisen

Helene Franzisca Kaisen , b. Schweida (born May 11, 1889 in Braunschweig ; † September 6 (other sources September 5, 1973 in Bremen ) was the politically active wife of the first post-war mayor of Bremen, Wilhelm Kaisen .

biography

Helene Kaisen was the daughter of the carpenter and social democrat Anton Schweida from the Bohemian town of Töschen and the Poznan cook Macianna Schweida, nee. Sobczyk. In 1890 the father was expelled from Braunschweig for his trade union and political activities under the Socialist Act and the family moved to Bremen.
After graduating from elementary and commercial school, she completed a commercial apprenticeship and worked as an accountant until 1912. She had been a member of the SPD since 1907 and was initially active in the socialist youth workers . In 1912 she became an assessor on the board of the local SPD and subsequently took on various party offices. In 1913/1914 she attended the SPD party school in Berlin, in her year she was the only woman out of 81 participants. She got to know Franz Mehring and Rosa Luxemburg as her teachers. At the party school she met Wilhelm Kaisen from Hamburg, whom she married on May 1, 1916.

During the First World War she worked in the Central Aid Committee of the Red Cross . Since 1916 she became one of the leaders of the anti-militarist Bremen women's movement and a member of the opposition youth movement. As chairman of the youth commission of the Social Democratic Association, she belonged to the left wing of the party. In 1917 she joined the USPD with this group .

After the First World War, she convinced her husband to move from Hamburg to Bremen. She was probably a co-founder of the local committee of the workers' welfare (AWO) and supported the AWO during the time of the Weimar Republic . At the beginning of the 1920s she was one of the leading members of the social democratic movement in Bremen alongside Anna Stiegler .

Her husband was a Senator for Welfare from 1928 to 1933 . He was persecuted by the Nazis in 1933 and the family with four children took over a settlement in Bremen- Borgfeld . The family lived there in relative isolation. Helene Kaisen helped people with legal and social matters, especially in the post-war period. After the Second World War , Wilhelm Kaisen became Senator for Welfare on June 6, 1945, and Mayor and President of the Senate on August 1, 1945. Helene Kaisen renewed herself for the AWO. She was chairwoman of the Bremen Neighborhood House Association between 1951 and 1964.

The Kaisen couple had two daughters and two sons. The eldest son Niels died in Russia in 1942 near Kiet in the Crimea .

She was buried in the Riensberg cemetery (grave location F 164).

Grave of Wilhelm and Helene Kaisen in the Riensberger Friedhof (2014)

Honors

• The Helene Kaisen neighborhood house in Gröpelingen and the Helene Kaisen Haus children's and youth hostel in Bremerhaven are reminiscent of Helene Kaisen .
• The Helene-Kaisen-Weg in the Neustadt was named after her.
• The Wilhelm and Helene Kaisen Foundation in her house in Borgfeld bears her name.
• The SK Wilhelm Kaisen , a sea ​​rescue cruiser of the German Society for Rescue of Shipwrecked People (DGzRS) built in 1978 , was named after her husband. The dinghy was named Helene.
• The Helene Kaisen primary school from 2017/18 is in the Huckelriede district.

literature

• Hans Koschnick (Hrsg.): Confidence and stability - Wilhelm Kaisen. Friedrich Röver-Verlag, Bremen 1977, ISBN 3-87681-069-8 .
• Karl-Ludwig Sommer: Wilhelm Kaisen - A political biography. Dietzverlag, Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-8012-0293-3 .
• Renate Meyer-Braun: Kaisen, Helene Francisca, b. Schweida . In: Women's history (s) , Bremer Frauenmuseum (ed.). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .

Web links

• CV Helene Kaisen on the website of the Wilhelm and Helene Kaisen Foundation
• Neighborhood house-Helene-Kaisen on bremer-buergerhaeuser.de