Käthe Schaub

Käthe Schaub (born April 15, 1892 in Hüttersdorf ; † September 17 or 26, 1973 in Dortmund ) was a social democratic politician. From 1947 to 1962 she was a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament .

Live and act

Käthe Schaub was born as the daughter of the single maid Katharina Krämer-Heisges in Hüttersdorf in Saarland. Since his mother had to work, Schaub grew up with his grandparents and relatives. After the mother's marriage to the grinder Emil Schaub, the latter adopted Käthe and took her into the household. The couple had eleven other children and the family situation was poor. She lived in Schalke for about ten years , then in Viersen and from 1908 in Rheydt . Schaub attended elementary school and then initially worked in a textile factory to contribute to the family income. Under the influence of her stepfather, she joined the union in 1908 at the age of 16, followed two years later by joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). After seven years in the factory, she went to Berlin in 1913 . In September 1917 she returned to Rheydt and became a housekeeper for privy councilor Kriegeskotte. At the end of 1918, after the First World War , she was dismissed and could not find any new work.

She tried to get by as a homeworker and received information from party circles about a special course in the welfare school of the city of Cologne , which was supposed to qualify women workers for professional work in welfare work. In December 1920 she successfully completed this course. At an SPD conference in Neuss, she met the Hörder District Administrator Wilhelm Hansmann , who encouraged her to apply to the Hörde district welfare office. But they couldn't be employed there; however, there was a vacancy as an official welfare officer in the neighboring municipality of Lütgendortmund in the Dortmund district . However, the appointment was delayed due to bureaucratic and organizational obstacles, so that Schaub first became a welfare worker in Cologne on April 1, 1922. The municipality of Lütgendortmund then offered her a job as a social worker, which she took up in December 1922. After a six-month trial period, the permanent position took place there. When she was hired, she insisted on further training and so after completing additional training in the summer of 1924 at the Social Women's School in Münster, she became a state-certified welfare worker .

After returning to Lütgendortmund, she immediately became involved in party politics. In May 1924 she became a member of the municipal council of Lütgendortmund and in November of the same year of the district council of the Dortmund district. In the district council she was elected as the second deputy of the district committee, worked primarily in social policy and campaigned against the incorporation of Lütgendortmund into Dortmund. However, this was carried out on April 1, 1928, whereby Schaub became a Dortmund civil servant. When new elections became necessary, she entered the Dortmund city council.

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, she was exposed to stalking. In the local elections on March 12, 1933, she was able to keep her mandate, since she accepted it, according to the law for the restoration of the professional civil service , she lost her professional existence. Her retirement pension was just enough to cover the subsistence level, she had to stop supporting relatives, and she took in the parents of her partner who had to leave their official residence in her unfinished house. Despite all this, she remained politically active: her garden was the meeting point of the Lütgendortmund Social Democrats and she kept the flag of the local association. In 1936/37 she briefly hid a Jewish child in her house and personally brought it back to its parents. Schaub was arrested in 1944 in connection with the grid action and was imprisoned in the Dortmund stone guard for six weeks .

Immediately after the Second World War she resumed her work at the Lütgendortmund district office. At first she did not want to become politically active again, but was pushed onto corresponding lists of the SPD. She became a member of the board of the Dortmund SPD, the subdistrict and the district of Western Westphalia. From 1947 on, with a short interruption, she was chairwoman of the district women's committee.

In 1946 the British military government appointed her a member of the non-executive Provincial Council for Westphalia. After that she belonged to the appointed Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia until 1947 . Her parliamentary group nominated her for the office of Secretary of Parliament's Bureau. She held this office until she left the state parliament. In 1947 she was temporarily chairman of the welfare committee. For health reasons, on July 1, 1947, she asked for another retirement. She then belonged as a member of the elected state parliament for constituency 110 (Dortmund V) from the first electoral term from 1947 to the fourth electoral term until 1962. Although she rarely spoke in plenary, she was very active as a member of numerous committees and commissions. She was a member (at different times) of the denazification, main, refugee, justice, budget and finance committee. Always looking for a balance between the parties and opinions, Schaub was called the “mother of parliament”. After the fourth electoral term, she decided not to run again and also resigned from most of the party offices. Käthe Schaub died on September 17 or 26, 1973 at the age of 81 in the Dortmund district of Lütgendortmund.

Honors

Käthe Schaub was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit in September 1962 . She initially refused the honor out of modesty and only accepted it after being persuaded by friends. In Dortmund-Lütgendortmund a path is named after her.

literature

• Dieter Knippschild: Käthe Schaub - "Mother of Parliament" . In: Bernd Faulenbach , Günter Högl (Hrsg.): A party in their region. On the history of the SPD in western Westphalia . Klartext, Essen 1988, ISBN 3-88474-126-8 , p. 198 ff .
• Alois Vogel, Lea Dommel: 60 years of the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament. The country and its deputies . In: President of the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia, Wolfgang Gärtner, Hans Zinkmann (Hrsg.): Writings of the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia . tape 17 . State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 550 .
• Bernd Haunfelder : North Rhine-Westphalia - Land and People 1946-2006. A biographical manual . Aschendorff, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-402-06615-7 , p. 404 .

Web links

Käthe Schaub at the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dieter Knippschild: Schaub, Käthe . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 1 . Ruhfus, Dortmund 1994, p. 123 ff .