Jeanette Wolff

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Jeanette Wolff , nee Cohen (* 22. June 1888 in Bocholt , † 19th May 1976 in West Berlin ) was a German politician of the SPD .

Life

Jeanette Cohen was the oldest of sixteen children. At the age of 16, in 1904, she began her training as a kindergarten teacher in Brussels and then worked as a kindergarten teacher and educator. She lived alternately in Brussels, where she also joined the Social Democratic Party, and Bocholt, where she met the Dutchman Philip Fullänge. The two married in 1908 and moved to Dinxperlo in the Netherlands . The daughter Margerieta was born on December 4th of the same year, but she died as a toddler in September of the following year, and her husband Philip died a good two weeks later. Also in 1909 she passed the Abitur at an evening grammar school. The young widow moved back to Bocholt that same year and met the businessman Hermann Wolff, whom she married in 1910. They settled in Bocholt and bought a small textile factory there and in 1912 they were the first company to introduce the 8-hour day . The marriage had three daughters Juliane (1912-1944), Edith (* 1916) and Käthe (1920-1944). In 1932 the family moved to Dinslaken .

Shortly after the NSDAP “came to power ” , Jeanette Wolff was arrested for her campaigning for the SPD and held in “ protective custody ” for two years . After her release in 1935, she opened a pension for Jews in Dortmund. There the family fell victim to the November pogroms in 1938 . Her husband Hermann was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp shortly afterwards . The youngest of the children, Käthe, was abducted the following year and shot in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 . Jeanette and her two remaining daughters lived through the Second World War until 1945 on an odyssey through various ghettos and camps. Wolff was deported to Riga in 1942 and did forced labor in the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp. After the concentration camp in Riga was dissolved, she was transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp , where she saw her husband for the last time. During the liberation by the Red Army , only Jeanette and her daughter Edith from the Wolff and Cohen families survived the Holocaust . The eldest daughter, Juliane, was murdered in the Kaiserwald concentration camp in 1944 . Her husband Hermann Wolff was deported from Stutthoff to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 , had to march from there to Flossenbürg concentration camp in early April 1945 and was shot by the SS on April 23 in Wetterfeld in the Upper Palatinate .

Jeanette Wolff and her daughter Edith were deported from the Stutthoff concentration camp to a subcamp and were supposed to be relocated to Reich territory, were liberated by the Red Army in Koronowo, Poland, around the turn of the year 1944/45 . They did not receive travel documents until December 1945, and on January 2, 1946 they were able to reach Berlin. In the years that followed, both of them dedicated themselves to social work in the compensation office in Berlin's Neukölln district ; Daughter Edith soon worked as a nurse in the Jewish hospital in Berlin.

politics

Jeanette Cohen found politics as a teenager when she joined the Socialist Youth in 1905 . During the Weimar Republic she was one of the few women in Westphalian local politics. As a city councilor and later city councilor, she represented the SPD in her hometown of Bocholt between 1919 and 1932. She was a party congress delegate and board member of the SPD district of West Westphalia. In addition, she was one of the founders of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt .

Just a few weeks after arriving in Berlin, she became involved in the SPD, first in the district assembly in Neukölln, then in the city assembly in the four-power city of Berlin. She fought vehemently at the side of Franz Neumann and Otto Suhr against the unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED . She remained a city councilor from 1946 to 1951. Due to an increase in the number of Berlin deputies, she moved to the first German Bundestag on February 1, 1952 and was a member of it until 1961. As a delegate to the SPD party congresses, Jeanette Wolff was a passionate debate speaker and she was one of the initiators of the SPD Seniors' Council established in the 1970s.

As a social worker in the Berlin district of Neukölln, she was involved in a union, initially in the union of office and commercial employees (GkB), which later became the German employees' union (DAG) in Berlin; In disagreement with the SED-oriented Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), she participated in the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Organization (UGO) in 1948 , from which the DGB and DAG in West Berlin emerged in 1950 . Until 1963, Jeanette Wolff was a deputy chairwoman of the voluntary union council of the German Employees' Union (DAG) .

From 1946 onwards, Jeanette Wolff took part in the rebuilding of the Jewish community in Berlin, especially the Jewish Women's Association. She was co-founder (1949), Jewish deputy chair (1949–1970) and Jewish chair (1970–1976) of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Berlin . She was also a co-founder of VVN Berlin .

From 1965 to 1975 she held the position of deputy chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany .

Honor

tomb

In 1967 she was awarded the honorary title of City Elder of Berlin and the following year, on her 80th birthday, she was made an honorary member of the International League for Human Rights .

Jeanette Wolff was buried in an honorary grave of the city of Berlin in the cemetery of the Jewish community in Berlin-Westend .

Streets in Berlin-Neukölln, Kleve and Dortmund were named after her. There is also a Jeanette Wolff School in Dortmund. The Jeanette-Wolff-Weg and the Jeanette-Wolff-Seniorenzentrum in her native Bocholt remind of her today. In Dinslaken, a secondary school on Wiesenstrasse used to bear her name; Since September 2018, a sculpture has been used to commemorate her on the square next to the Neutor Gallery on Rutenwall. In 1961 she received the Federal Cross of Merit and in 1975 she was honored with the Leo Baeck Prize. In 1973 she received the Ernst Reuter badge in Berlin . A senior citizens' residential complex in Berlin-Charlottenburg bears her name.

literature

  • Gunter Lange : Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, ISBN 3-87831-468-X
  • Birgit Seemann : Jeanette Wolff. Politician and committed democrat (1888–1976). Campus, Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-593-36465-4 .
  • Bernd Faulenbach (Ed.), Anja Wißmann: "Have the courage to do humanely." The Jew and democrat Jeanette Wolff in her time (1888–1976) . Klartext, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-89861-168-X
  • Willy Albrecht: Jeanette Wolff, Jakob Altmaier , Peter Blachstein . The three Jewish members of the Bundestag until the beginning of the sixties . In: Julius H. Schoeps (Ed.): Leben im Land der Täter Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-934658-17-2 , pp. 236-253.
  • Martina Weinem: Jeanette Wolff: "It takes more courage to love than to hate." In: Frauengeschichtskreis Dinslaken (ed.): The other look. Women's life in Dinslaken. Essen 2001, ISBN 3-89861-020-9 , pp. 152-160.
  • Ulrich Werner Grimm , Red .: The Berlin Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. History (s) in the mirror of their sources. In: Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Berlin e. V. (Ed.): In conversation. 50 years of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Berlin V. A Festschrift. Berlin 1999
  • Pnina Navè Levinson: What happened to Sara's daughters? Women in Judaism. Siebenstern TB 495, Gütersloh 1989 ISBN 3-579-00495-6 , pp. 156-158.
  • Jeanette Wolff: "With the Bible and Bebel" A memorial book. Foreword by Herbert Wehner . Edited by Hans Lamm with G. David Grossmann a . Nora Walter. Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn Bad Godesberg 1981, ISBN 3-87831-351-9 .
  • Dieter Oelschlägel: "Have the courage to do human work!" Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976 . In: Sabine Hering (ed.), With Sandra Schönauer: Jüdische Wohlfahrt im Spiegel von Biographien (series of publications History of Jewish welfare in Germany, 2). Eds. Hering, Gudrun Maierhof, Ulrich Stascheit. Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 3-936065-80-2 , pp. 424–433 (with 1 photo).
  • Ulrike Schneider: Biographies of Jewish women: Jeanette Wolff (1888–1976) - Jewish, social democrat and women's rights activist . In: Medaon 11 (2017), 20 ( online (PDF)).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, pp. 57–57
  2. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, pp. 61 and 67–68
  3. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, pp. 73/75 ff., P. 115 ff., P. 141
  4. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, pp. 61 and 67–68
  5. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, p. 90
  6. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, p. 68 u. P. 82
  7. 1948 . In: Annual calendar of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein
  8. ^ Jeanette-Wolff-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  9. ^ Website of the Jeanette Wolff School on WordPress
  10. ^ Gunter Lange: Jeanette Wolff 1888–1976. A biography . Neue Gesellschaft / Dietz, Bonn 1988, Bonn 1988, p. 135