Margarete Hahne

Margarete Hahne , also Margarete Kauschke , (born as Margarete Lux, July 21, 1898 in Breslau ; died September 3, 1973 in Berlin ) was a German communist.

Life

Margarete Lux did a commercial apprenticeship and worked as a stenographer in Wroclaw. She joined the clerks' union and the USPD in 1917 . In 1919 she married the worker Ferdinand Valentin Hahne and had a daughter born in 1920. From 1919 she worked as a secretary for the USPD organ Schlesische Arbeiter-Zeitung , which in 1921 became the KPD-Zeitung. Hahne joined the KPD and took on various tasks in the party. From 1924 to 1929 she was a correspondent for a cloth company in Breslau.

Hahne was one of the founders of the Red Women and Girls' Union (RFMB) in 1926 and became its leader in Silesia . In 1928 she became a member of the district leadership of the KPD and head of women's work in the district. For the KPD she ran unsuccessfully for the Prussian state parliament in 1928 , but was elected to the city council in Breslau. On the XII. At the 1929 party congress of the KPD, she became a member of the Central Committee of the KPD . She moved to Berlin, worked as a secretary for the communist working group of socio-political organizations (ARSO) and from 1932 as a union secretary for the RGO textile workers' association .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Hahne fled to the ČSR without her husband in September 1933 , where she worked on a newspaper that was smuggled into Germany.

In 1938 Hahne emigrated to France, where she was in contact with Willi Munzenberg's circle and thus came into opposition to the party line, especially since, allegedly without her knowledge, she signed an appeal that appeared in Munzenberg's newspaper Zukunft .

In France, when the war broke out, Hahne was imprisoned in Versailles for two months and then interned as an enemy foreigner in the Gurs camp and from 1943 to 1945 in Yenne . In 1940 she was expelled from the KPD. Your new life partner, who also emigrated communist functionary Karl Kauschke (1892-1973), was deported in 1942 as a forced laborer to Germany and worked in Potsdam , after the war, he was first of the SMAD in local government of Potsdam as head of the department of Posts, Telegraph and Transport deployed, but then arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to ten years in prison and only released in 1952. Hahne and Kauschke married in 1958.

Hahne was able to return to Germany at the beginning of 1946 through the mediation of French trade unionists. She worked in Berlin-Köpenick in the department store of the East and in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg in social welfare. Because of Kauschke's imprisonment, she did not join the SED . At the end of 1948 she moved to Berlin-Wedding and in 1951 became a member of the SPD in West Berlin . Hahne no longer emerged politically, but engaged in welfare work.

literature

• Hahne, Margarete , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol. 1: Politics, economics, public life . Munich: Saur 1980, p. 265
• Hahne, Margarete , in: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . Berlin: Karl Dietz, 2004, ISBN 3-320-02044-7 , pp. 282f.
• Werner Reutter: Kauschke, Margarete (1898–1973): Proletarian social politician . In: Siegfried Mielke (ed.): Trade unionists in the Nazi state: persecution, resistance, emigration . Essen: Klartext, 2008, ISBN 978-3-89861-914-1 , pp. 203-208