Irmgard Enderle

Irmgard Enderle (born April 28, 1895 in Frankfurt am Main ; † September 20, 1985 in Cologne ), née Rasch, code names Cleopatra and J. Reele , was a socialist politician, trade unionist and journalist .

biography

The daughter of a grammar school teacher was a member of the Wandervogels and the Freideutschen Jugend , trained as a teacher and, from 1917, studied pedagogy and economics at the University of Berlin for several semesters . Here she started a socialist student group and joined the Spartakusbund in November 1918 and, after its founding, the KPD . From mid-1919 she worked full-time in the KPD apparatus, initially briefly in the rural department, then until 1924 in the trade union department. In 1924, Irmgard Rasch, who belonged to the “right” wing around August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler , was replaced by the new “left” leadership around Ruth Fischer and took a position as a union editor at the KPD newspaper Klassenkampf in Halle same post at the central organ Rote Fahne .

At the beginning of 1929 Irmgard Rasch was expelled from the party as a supporter of Brandler and Thalheimer by the Thälmann leadership and joined the newly founded KPO . With the group around Paul Frölich , Jacob Walcher and August Enderle , whom she married in the same year, she joined the SAPD in 1932 , where she was a member of the local leadership in the strong local branch in Breslau.

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP , she and her husband initially directed the illegal work of the SAPD in the region, was briefly imprisoned in June 1933 and then under police supervision, and in August of that year she fled via the Netherlands and Belgium to Sweden, where she from 1934 was resident. In Stockholm Enderle, who was expatriated by the Nazi state in 1941, was one of the leading members of the SAPD regional group together with her husband and Stefan Szende and from summer 1940 Willy Brandt . a. Active in supporting the party's resistance groups in northern Germany, in the national group of German trade unionists in Sweden and in the movement for a popular front up to the Moscow trials . In the period around 1937/38 she was - unlike August Enderle - close to the break-off of Neuer Weg around Peter Blachstein and Walter Fabian . Enderle's journalistic work (in addition to his work for the SAPD bodies) was primarily for the Swedish trade union press and the Swiss Red Review . With the Swedish SAPD national group, she joined the SPD in November 1944 .

In summer 1945 she returned to Germany with August Enderle with the help of the ITF , where she settled in Bremen and took part in the rebuilding of the SPD there and the Bremen trade unions. In the same year she was also one of the founders of the Weser-Kurier , of which she was an editor until 1947.

Enderle was an important woman in the Bremen women's movement . In 1946, together with Agnes Heineken , Anna Stiegler , Käthe Popall and Anna Klara Fischer, she was a founding member and board member of the Bremen Women's Committee , a socially recognized, non-partisan and non-denominational umbrella organization of women's organizations from all areas of society in Bremen. From 1946 to 1947 she was chairman of the association; she was followed by Charlotte Niehaus in this office.

From 1946 to 1947 Enderle was also a member of the Bremen citizenship and from 1948 to 1949 of the Economic Council of the Bizone . She then worked as an editor for the Bund newspaper from 1947 to 1949 and for the DGB newspaper Welt der Arbeit from 1949 to 1951, as well as working as a freelance journalist and in trade union education . At the same time, Enderle held leadership positions in the union, for example she was a member of the board of directors of IG Druck und Papier from 1950 to 1955 and at times chairwoman of the German Union of Journalists and chairwoman of the DGB women's committee ; she was also a member of the Association of Persecuted Persons of the Nazi Regime and the Humanist Union .

Works

• Nazisms and Tysklands näringsliv . Stockholm 1944.
• On the post-war policy of the German socialists. Stockholm 1944. (Co-author, with Willy Brandt , August Enderle, Stefan Szende and Ernst Behm)
• Excess women and gainful employment . Bielefeld 1947.

literature

• Rasch (Enderle), Irmgard . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Edith Laudowicz : Enderle, Irmgard, m. Rasch-Enderle, alias Cleopatra and J. Reels . In: Frauen Geschichte (n) , Bremer Frauenmuseum (ed.). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Irmgard Enderle in the catalog of the German National Library