Rosi Wolfstein

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Rosalie Wolfstein (after marriage in 1948 Rosi Frölich ) (born May 27, 1888 in Witten , † December 11, 1987 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a socialist politician.

Life

The parents' house in Witten at Nordstrasse 12

Rosi Wolfstein was born into a Jewish, initially well-off merchant family in Witten. Due to economic difficulties, her father took her own life when she was thirteen. She threw that have a secondary school attended, back to a commercial college for vocational training as a clerk. In 1907 she joined the women's and girls 'workers' education association in Hagen, in 1908 the SPD and in 1910 the free trade union central association of employees (ZdA). In the same year she first met Rosa Luxemburg in Kamen , with whom a friendship developed and whose pupil she was at the SPD party school in Berlin from 1912 to 1913 . Already at the beginning of the First World War she turned against the castle peace policy of the SPD and their approval of the war credits and became a member of the Duisburg Spartacus group . She was arrested several times during the war. In 1916 she took part in the illegal youth conference in Jena and in 1917 as a representative of the Spartakus group at the founding party conference of the USPD in Gotha. During the November Revolution of 1918 she was elected to the Düsseldorf Workers and Soldiers Council; As a delegate of the local Spartacus group, she was a co-founder of the KPD in 1918/19 and took part in the second congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1920.

After Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, Wolfstein received the estate from her heirs, which she worked on together with her partner Paul Frölich . The biography of Rosa Luxemburg. Thought and Act appeared in Paris in 1939 under Frölich's name. Wolfstein dealt with the subject of "Rosa Luxemburg" all his life. She also stood by Margarethe von Trotta for the 1985 film “ Rosa Luxemburg ”.

From 1921 to 1924 she sat as a member of the VKPD in the Prussian state parliament and was deputy parliamentary group leader. From 1921 to 1923 she was a member of the KPD headquarters and the organization office, where she was responsible for the party publishers. In 1924 she resigned from her party offices in protest against the “ultra-left” KPD leadership led by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow , took part with Paul Frölich in the editing of Rosa Luxemburg's edition of works and worked temporarily as an editor at Malik-Verlag . At the beginning of 1929 she was expelled from the KPD as a “legal deviator” and joined the KPD-O . With a minority of the KPD-O around Paul Frölich, Jacob Walcher and August Enderle , she joined the SAP in the spring of 1932 and belonged to the left, revolutionary wing, which took over the party leadership in the spring of 1933. At SAP she also met Willy Brandt , with whom a friendship developed and who visited her in the old people's home in the 1980s.

After coming to power of the Nazi party in 1933, they initially fled to Brussels, then to Paris, where she belonged to the exiled leadership of the SAP and published under the pseudonym Martha Koch. After the beginning of the war, she was interned in France. In 1941, together with Paul Frölich, with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee of Varian Fry , she managed to emigrate to the USA via Lisbon and Martinique , where she worked for various charities in New York from 1945. The two married there in 1948. In 1951 she returned to Frankfurt and became a member of the SPD again, although, like Paul Frölich, she continued to advocate a left-wing socialist “third way”, which, given the historical conditions, she considered feasible only in the SPD held, as well as the IG Druck und Papier , where she was involved in founding the German Union of Journalists . After Paul Frölich's death in 1953, she administered his literary estate and edited some of his works. Rosi Wolfstein died in 1987; Prime Minister Holger Börner gave a speech in her honor at her funeral in Frankfurt's main cemetery .

In her hometown of Witten, a "Rosi-Wolfstein-Gesellschaft eV", founded by Peter Kieselbach in cooperation with the history workshop, worked in her honor in the 1990s, without any activities since 2009.

Wolfstein has been described as a short-lived woman who developed an extraordinary presence as a speaker. As emerges from secret police reports, she was already known as a feared "agitator" during the German Empire.

recognition

  • The Rosi-Wolfstein-Straße was named after her in Witten.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Frölich: In the radical camp. Political autobiography 1890–1921 . Edited by Reiner Tosstorff. Basis-Druck, Berlin 2013, p. 352
  2. ↑ See: Mario Keßler : Heroic Illusion and Stalin Terror. Contributions to communism research . Hamburg 1999, p. 152.
  3. ↑ onlinestreet page for the Wolfstein Society, whose website is now inactive
personal data
SURNAME Wolfstein, Rosi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alma Rosali W., Rosi Frölich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Witten
DATE OF DEATH December 11, 1987
Place of death Frankfurt am Main