Marie Bittorf

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Marie Bittorf (* July 8, 1886 in Mühlhausen / Thuringia ; † September 5, 1974 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German trade unionist, social and local politician and an early member of the women's movement.

Life and political career

Marie Bittorf was born as Marie Olga as the daughter of a Thuringian landowner. She came to Frankfurt in 1903 at the age of 17 as a housemaid . As early as 1906 she was involved in founding a union organization for domestic servants. In 1910, she joined the SPD after being expelled from meetings by the police several times as a listener. In 1913 she attended the first course at the women's seminar for social professional work in Frankfurt. In 1917 she was the first woman to take up her job as a municipal health worker within the AOK . She had to quit this service during the National Socialist era in 1933.

City councilors

After the First World War, Bittorf went into local politics. In the first local election after the introduction of women's suffrage , she was elected to the city council of Frankfurt on March 2, 1919. She was one of 11 women there (the others were Frieda Vergens, Anna Schwappach and Henriette Fürth (SPD), Tony Sender (USPD), Jenny Apolant, Meta Gadesmann, Carola Barth, Dr. Anna Schultz (DDP), Zoyla Bontant (center ) and Anna Landsberg (DVP)). In the city council she belonged to the election proposal committee, the special committee for the reorganization of the technical school system, the input committee, the professional debt deputation, the deputation for housing and health, the youth welfare deputation and the funeral deputation. She was re-elected in the local elections on May 4, 1924, May 20, 1928 and November 17, 1929. In the local elections of March 12, 1933, she received no mandate, but on March 28, 1933 she moved up to the city council for Heinrich Kromer.

Political work became dangerous when the National Socialists came to power . After the Social Democrats rejected the NSDAP application for an honorary pension for the relatives of the murdered NSDAP members Hans Handwerk and Josef Bleser in the city council meeting on June 13, 1933, they were forcibly forced out of the room. The majority of the Social Democrats, including Bittdorf, no longer took part in the special session of the city parliament on June 17th, at which Friedrich Krebs was elected mayor . With the circular issued by the Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring on June 23, 1933, she lost her mandate, like all members of the SPD, which was forcibly dissolved.

MPs in the municipal parliament

From 1920 to 1925 and again briefly in 1929, Bittorf was a member of the Wiesbaden Municipal Parliament and the Hessen-Nassau Provincial Parliament . It was elected in 1920 for the Frankfurt district and the SPD. In the municipal state elections on November 29, 1925, she was not elected, but moved up in 1929 for the late Heinrich Hopf . In the municipal state elections of November 17, 1929, it was again unsuccessful. In the municipal parliament she was the initiator for the establishment of the advanced training school for domestic workers in Frankfurt's Löwengasse.

In the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933 , she ran for 10th place on the SPD list for the constituency of Hessen-Nassau, but was not elected.

Further life

Together with her lifelong friend, the women's rights activist Meta Quarck-Hammerschlag , Bittorf was one of the co-founders of the AWO Frankfurt and in 1945, after the Second World War, one of the re-founders of this social association in Frankfurt.

After Bittorf was forced to leave her job by the Nazis, she was granted a pension; Until the end of the war she also worked as a volunteer welfare worker. She was only able to return to the AOK in 1946. Together with other women, Bittorf founded the Frankfurt Women's Committee in 1946, which later became the Frankfurt Women's Association. In the local elections on May 26, 1946 , the woman from Frankfurt was re-elected to the now again democratic city council and was involved there for another ten years, among other things for social, health and educational issues.

Private

In the post-war years, Bittorf looked after her elderly friend Quarck-Hammerschlag and shared the apartment with her in Frankfurt-Bornheim, where Meta died in 1954.

In 1966 she moved to the “Bürgermeister-Gräf-Haus” retirement home in Sachsenhausen, where she died at the age of 88.

Honors

  • 1952 Federal Cross of Merit
  • 1956 Appointment as Frankfurt City Elder as the first woman with this honorary title for long-term local politicians
  • 2015 Naming of a green area in Frankfurt's Dornbusch district after Marie Bittorf. For years the magistrate had blocked the naming of the previously nameless complex, which the local advisory council had decided in 1990, because only writers were to be honored in the poets' quarter . The name tag required by the local council has now been attached.
  • At least since 2016 "Marie Bittorf Prize" of the SPD-affiliated Academy for Local Politics (AfP) Hessen

literature

  • Michael Bermejo: The Victims of the Dictatorship - History of the Frankfurt City Council, Volume 3: Frankfurt City Councilors and Magistrate Members as Persecuted by the Nazi State, 2006, ISBN 978-3-7829-0562-6 , pp. 46–49.
  • Jochen Lengemann : MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , p. 77.
  • Nassau parliamentarians. Part 2: Barbara Burkardt, Manfred Pult: The municipal parliament of the Wiesbaden administrative district 1868–1933 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Nassau. Vol. 71 = Prehistory and history of parliamentarism in Hesse. Vol. 17). Historical Commission for Nassau, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-930221-11-X , No. 39.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hanna Eckhardt: Who's that girl - who is shaking hands with John F. Kennedy? [1] , website of the AWO district association Frankfurt, accessed on February 3, 2017
  2. ↑ Marie Bittorf Prize of the Academy for Local Politics in Hesse Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated February 3, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Call for tenders on the AfP Hessen website, accessed on February 3, 2017 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.afk-hessen.de
  3. ↑ Hanna Eckhardt: Who's that girl - who is shaking hands with John F. Kennedy? [2] , website of the AWO district association Frankfurt, accessed on February 3, 2017
  4. ^ Resolution of the local advisory council 9 of November 5, 2015 [3] , PARLIS parliamentary information system of the City of Frankfurt am Main, accessed on February 3, 2017
  5. ^ Marie Bittorf Prize of the Academy for Local Politics in Hessen 2016, call for applications on the website of the Academy for Local Policy Hessen [4]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Accessed on February 3, 2017@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / assets02.hessenspd.net  
personal data
SURNAME Bittorf, Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trade unionist, social and local politician and early member of the women's movement
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Mühlhausen / Thuringia
DATE OF DEATH 5th September 1974
Place of death Frankfurt am Main