Ida Altmann

Ida Altmann (born June 30, 1862 in Obscherninken , East Prussia , † November 30, 1935 in Berlin ) was a German trade unionist and an actor in the proletarian women's movement .

Life

Origin and youth

Ida Altmann came from a Jewish family and was able to attend the municipal secondary school for girls in Königsberg , which many women of her time were denied. In 1881 she passed her exams as a primary school teacher in Königsberg.

As a Jew, she was denied a position as a teacher in state schools. She traveled to St. Petersburg in 1881 and worked there as a tutor. She traveled a lot and tried her hand at writing stories and poetry. In 1890 she moved from St. Petersburg to Berlin.

Activities in the Berlin community of freethinkers

In 1891 she resigned from Judaism in Berlin. From 1892 she was an active member of the Free Religious Community of Berlin , a humanistic-atheistic association. It was she who formulated the principles of the Berlin Free Religious Community in writing in 1895. One of these principles was: "Free self-determination according to the advancing reason and science in all areas of life". Because of her activities she was under police surveillance and in 1895 she had to serve a prison sentence for the first time because she had defied a ban on her lecturing activities - the repressive handling of association law and other regulations was typical in the 1890s for the action of the state against as " activities viewed subversively . Due to her commitment to social democracy and free thinkers, Ida Altmann was also finally banned from entering the state school service, she was only allowed to work as a private teacher. She did this above all in the context of the youth work of the free religious community. For at times over 500 children, Ida Altmann conducted "cultural history lessons", held ceremonies and lectures. From 1900 to 1912 Ida Altmann worked in the International Freethinkers Association as secretary for Germany and as secretary on the board of the Free Religious Community in Berlin.

Proletarian women's movement

In addition to the free thinkers, Ida Altmann was also involved in social democracy, which at the time worked closely with the free thinker movement. Together with Emma Ihr and Clara Zetkin she worked in Berlin to build a proletarian women's movement. This movement emerged in the 1880s as a socialist parallel to the bourgeois women's movement and had to fight on several fronts: it was persecuted by the police with bans on organization and assembly, in the labor movement, on the other hand, it was often viewed as a potentially divisive special effort, while the bourgeois women's movement saw it as too radical. The political police also observed Ida Altmann and considered her to be one of the leading agitators of the proletarian women's movement in Berlin. However, Ida Altmann and her colleagues overcame all resistance and have been able to establish the proletarian women's movement as a constant since the 1990s. Altmann was particularly active in the trade union sector, from 1905 she was Germany's first full-time trade union secretary for more than three years. Her position at the “Union Workers' Secretariat” of the General Commission of Trade Unions dealt specifically with the problems of working women. Emma Ihr and Ida Altmann, together with Carl Legien, pushed through the creation of this position against strong reservations.

Exit from politics

Ida Altmann resigned from the General Commission on March 1, 1909. After that, however, she continued to work as a translator and interpreter for the General Commission. At the same time she appeared as a speaker at social democratic meetings. In April 1912 she married her long-time friend Jegor Bronn , (1870–1932) who worked as an inventor and chief engineer at the Rombach ironworks . In the same year she moved to Rombach in Alsace-Lorraine . She no longer emerged politically, but continued to publish essays and articles in Free Spiritual Papers, and wrote poems and novels. After her return to Berlin with her husband in 1919, Ida Altmann-Bronn only resumed her active membership in Berlin's free religious community. She took intensive care of her husband, who had kidney disease, with whom she went on a few recreational trips to Nice . After his death in 1932, she withdrew completely from the public. She died in Berlin in 1935.

Memorial stone

In 2005, a memorial stone was set for her at the Pappelallee cemetery of the Free Religious Community of Berlin .

literature

• Gisela Losseff-Tillmanns : Ida Altmann-Bronn (1862–1935): social democrat - free thinker - trade unionist. In: Work - Movement - History Volume III / 2016.
• Gisela Losseff-Tillmanns: Ida Altmann-Bronn 1862-1935. Story of a social democratic, free-thinking trade unionist. A search for clues, Baden-Baden 2015.
• Altmann, Ida. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 1: A-Benc. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22681-0 , p. 138 f.
• Johannes Nebmaier: Ida Altmann-Bronn 1862–1935. Free religious teacher, free thinker, social democrat, trade unionist, writer . Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86460-337-2

Individual evidence

1. ^ Carl Graf von Klinckowstroem:  Bronn, Jegor Israel. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 634 ( digitized version ).