Maria Deku

Maria Deku (born March 18, 1901 in Düsseldorf , † April 19, 1983 in Kleinblittersdorf ; born Maria Karwatzki ) was a German politician of the CSU and a peace activist .

biography

Maria Karwatzki was born as the daughter of an East Prussian elementary school director and a Moselle winegrower's daughter. After graduating from high school in Cologne , she began studying German and linguistics, and in 1922 she married the lawyer Dr. Rudolf Deku from Krefeld.

From 1925 Deku worked in the Catholic German Women's Association . Due to the reprisals of the National Socialists, whose opponents were Deku and her husband, Maria Deku was forced to go on an odyssey through all of Germany before she and her youngest daughter settled in Hauzendorf (today part of Bernhardswald / Regensburg district) in 1943 .

After the end of the war, Deku was appointed by the military government as a department head in the government of Lower Bavaria / Upper Palatinate in the denazification department. In 1946 she was a member of the state committee of the newly founded CSU. She became a member of the Bavarian pre-parliament (February - June 1946) and a member and secretary of the constituent state assembly from July to November 1946. From December 1946 to February 1948 she was a member of the Bavarian state parliament for the constituencies of Neunburg vorm Wald and Sulzbach-Rosenberg and belonged to four Committees. Her husband, Rudolf Deku, was the district administrator for the Sulzbach-Rosenberg district from June 1946 to September 1947.

Maria Deku was attacked when in the constituent state assembly the anchoring of the office of "Bavarian State President" in the constitution was rejected by a majority of only one vote. Other CSU MPs had also voted against this, but the anger of those in favor of a state presidency was primarily directed against Maria Deku because she was a non-Bavarian (“Prussian”). When her husband was appointed chief district director in Aachen on December 1, 1947 , Maria Deku also left Bavaria and resigned from her state parliament mandate. This ended her political career, but continued to work in the Catholic German Women's Association, in the Child Protection Association and in the Claudel Society . In addition, she was particularly involved in the international women's and peace movement.

In 1983 she died in Kleinblittersdorf, where she had spent the last years of her life with her daughter.