Luise Dornemann

Luise Dornemann (born February 23, 1901 in Aurich ; † January 17, 1992 in Berlin ) was a figure in the German and international women's movement . She was a functionary of the Democratic Women's Association of Germany for 40 years .

Life

Dornemann, nee Fremy, was born as the daughter of a judicial officer in Aurich. She attended elementary school and the lyceum and then the teachers' seminar in Aachen , which she graduated in 1921. She worked as a teacher until 1924. In 1928 she joined the KPD . Since the establishment of the unified association for proletarian sexual reform and maternity protection in May 1932, she was its chairman, until 1933 she headed the Düsseldorf sex counseling center. After the murder of her husband Johannes Dornemann by the National Socialists in 1933 , she lived in Berlin and emigrated to Great Britain in 1936 . Here she belonged to the Free German Cultural Association . From 1942 to 1947 she worked as a political secretary at the British Council for German Democracy in London.

In 1947 she returned to Germany and went to the Soviet occupation zone . Here she became a member of the SED and the Democratic Women's Association of Germany (DFD). From 1948 to 1951 she was the secretary of the DFD federal executive board, where she was responsible for training, education and upbringing, and later for international relations. Dornemann was then until 1953 the representative of the DFD in the International Democratic Women's Federation (IDFF). She was a member of the DFD national board for almost 40 years (1949–1989). From 1953 to 1963 she was a research assistant at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED , then worked as a freelance writer. From 1960 to 1962 she was a member of the Women's Commission of the SED Politburo.

She is the author of biographies on the German women's movement, for example on Jenny Marx (1953, 10th edition 1984) and Clara Zetkin (1957, 9th edition 1989), which have been translated into almost all the major languages ​​of the former socialist states. She also wrote All the Days of Her Life: Female Figures from Two Centuries (1981, 3rd edition 1988), which contains the biographies of Roberta Gropper , Johanna Melzer , Auguste Lewinsohn and Margarethe Wengel.

In 1968 she was the first to be awarded the DFD Literature Prize. In 1976 she received the Patriotic Order of Merit (VVO) in gold, in 1981 the VVO in gold and in 1986 the Karl Marx Order .

literature

• Martin Broszat et al. (Ed.): SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany 1945–1949 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1993, p. 889.
• Andreas Herbst et al. (Ed.): This is how the GDR worked . Volume 3: Lexicon of Functionaries . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1994, p. 68.
• Wilhelm Sternfeld , Eva Tiedemann: German Exile Literature 1933-1945. A bio bibliography . Schneider, Heidelberg / Darmstadt 1962.
• Dornemann, Luise . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Federal Archives SAPMO NY 4278 (Dornemann estate)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Neues Deutschland , March 6, 1981, p. 2.