Lenelotte from Bothmer

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Helene-Charlotte (Lenelotte) von Bothmer , née Wepfer (born October 27, 1915 in Bremen , † June 19, 1997 in Isernhagen near Hanover , Lower Saxony ) was a German politician ( SPD ) and writer.

biography

Family, education and work

Bothmer was the daughter of geologist Emil Wepfer and Anna-Maria Meyer. In 1939 she married the teacher Hermann von Bothmer (1912–1987), son of the landowner Thorwald von Bothmer.

She studied German , English and history at the universities of Berlin and Tübingen . She worked as a teacher at a women's college. After the war she worked as an interpreter for the military government in the British sector and as a museum teacher for the city of Hanover.

politics

Bothmer joined the SPD in 1945. She was a member of the sub-district executive committee of the SPD Peine - Burgdorf for eight years . She worked as chairwoman of the sub-district women's committee and the district women's committee of the SPD, as well as a member of the SPD district committee in Hanover and on the party council of the Federal SPD.

From 1966 to 1967 she was a member of the Lower Saxony State Parliament , from 1969 to 1980 of the German Bundestag . She belonged to the Bundestag committees for education and science as well as for foreign affairs. She was particularly involved in peace policy and in the fight against apartheid in South Africa .

From 1971 to 1983 Bothmer was chairwoman of the Federation for Nature Conservation and Landscape Management in Lower Saxony (today BUND ). She was the founder of the German-Arab Parliamentary Society and its president from 1976 to 1981.

On October 14, 1970, she sparked a scandal because she was the first woman in a trouser suit to give a speech in the Bundestag. On April 15, 1970, she had already appeared in the plenary in a trouser suit. Previously, the Vice President of the Bundestag Richard Jaeger (CSU) had declared that he would not allow any woman to enter the plenary in pants, let alone to step to the lectern. Provoked by this statement, she bought a light-colored pants suit and entered the Bundestag. As a result, she received a large number of anonymous letters, some of which were violently insulted.

After retiring from politics, she worked as a writer and wrote several books and plays. At the Writers ' Congress in Berlin (May 14/15, 1986) she was elected as an assessor on the federal board of the Association of German Writers (VS) , now in ver.di , and held this office until September 1987.

Fonts

Audio book

  • Meet Mr. Böök. Stories by Lenelotte von Bothmer and music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Spoken by the author. Ohrbuch, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-927689-15-7 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Philipp Rock: Power, Markets and Morals: On the role of human rights in the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany in the sixties and seventies . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-59705-7 , p. 157 f.
  2. Martina Züger: 40 years ago: first appearance of a woman with trousers in the Bundestag. In: WDR2 broadcast “Stichtag” . April 15, 2010, accessed January 15, 2020 .