Sonja Lerch

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Sonja Rabinowitz (1909)

Sonja Lerch , born as Sarah Sonja Rabinowitz , (May 3 . Jul / 15 May 1882 greg. In Warsaw ; † 29. March 1918 in Munich ) was a German socialist and peace activist .

Life

Sonja Lerch's life is not easy to reconstruct. She presented her early life in a curriculum vitae that was attached to her 1912 dissertation. Much more information can be found in the interrogation files of the Munich police after their arrest in 1918. However, they only cover the part of life in which the political police were interested. There are contradictions and gaps in the documents.

Lerch was born as the daughter of the writer Saul Pinchas Rabbinowicz and attended the Second Girls' High School in Warsaw. She went to the teacher training college and passed the teacher exam in 1899. In the same year she translated Nahida Remy's “The Jewish Woman” from German into Russian. 1901–1903 Sonja Rabinowitz matriculated at the University of Vienna and heard a. a. with the Austromarxist Carl Grünberg . From the winter semester of 1903 to May 31, 1905, she was matriculated in Bern. According to her own statements, she taught at a school in Warsaw from 1905 to 1906, where she was accepted into the school administration, and in 1907 she taught in Odessa . Rabinowitz was a member of the Jewish Workers' Union even before 1900 and probably traveled to Odessa on its behalf to prepare for the first Russian revolution in 1905 . As a member of the Workers and Deputies Council in Odessa, she was arrested and imprisoned in March 1907. In May 1907 Sarah Sonja Rabinowitz managed to escape from Odessa by ship to Constantinople via Vienna to her parents, who had fled from Warsaw to Frankfurt am Main in 1907 . During the interrogation in 1918, however, Lerch stated that she had first gone to Vienna in 1907 in order to be active as a writer and to have earned a living with private lessons before she followed her parents to Frankfurt in 1908. She got involved with the “ Bund ” and the SPD in Frankfurt and published in German , Russian and Yiddish . In 1910 she would have been temporarily in Munich, where she wrote for the SPD newspaper Münchener Post , among other things .

From 1908 she studied economics in Giessen and Zurich , and received her doctorate in Giessen in 1912 on the subject of the development of the labor movement in Russia up to the great revolution of 1905 . In 1912 she married the Romanist Eugen Lerch , whom she first met in Munich, and moved with him to Berlin, where she gave private lessons in Slavic languages. For the academic year 1913/14, she went to Munich with her husband on October 1, 1913, when he completed his habilitation at the LMU and became a private lecturer.

Sonja Lerch was a pacifist and in 1914 was one of the first declared war opponents when the First World War broke out . As a co-founder of the Munich USPD , she organized together with Kurt Eisner , Hans Unterleitner, Richard Kämper u. a. In January 1918, as part of the January strike actions, a strike by approx. 3000 Munich munitions factory workers to enforce the general peace and was arrested on February 1, 1918 for treason.

In addition to Eisner and Ernst Toller, Lerch is one of the main speakers at the meetings, although the police minutes only mention her by name, but do not include her speeches in shorthand. A report received from the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office to the Bavarian Ministry of Justice describes an appearance by Sonja Lerch:

“She immediately called on Eisner for a mass uprising, spoke of the connection between the German and the Russian proletariat and, in particular, at the meeting on January 31, 1918 in the Wagner-Bräu, justified the idea that the idea of ​​freedom would finally be realized in Munich, and called for it not to resume work until the idea of ​​freedom has prevailed. Their speeches also had a decisive effect on those present in terms of the decision to stoppage and the continuation of the strike. […] During the judicial interrogation she denied having committed treason; she does not see treason in the call for a mass strike. "

Eugen Lerch publicly distanced himself from his wife's political activity and filed for divorce so as not to endanger his career at LMU. A note about it appeared in the "Münchner Post" on February 2, 1918. She agreed to the divorce, but continued to love him. She was arrested when she wanted to see him again after going into hiding. Lerch did not visit his wife in almost eight weeks of their pre-trial detention. On March 15, 1918, Sonja Lerch was transferred from the Neudeck remand prison to the Munich-Stadelheim prison, as the only one of the prisoners of the January strike. There she was found hanged on March 29, 1918.

In his autobiography curriculum vitae is Victor Klemperer , a colleague of Eugen Lerch and friend of the family, the situation is different: So Lerch had reported after the funeral Sonya Klemperer and his wife that it was Sonja Lerch, who wanted the divorce to free to be. Both would have worked together for pacifism, but Sonja Lerch's “hostility towards Germans” would have stood between them and alienated them. He shouldn't have visited her in prison. An admission would have been his half-sentence, after "you can say that I sacrificed Sonja for my career."

Eisner in his diary of April 2nd and a public report in the Leipziger Volkszeitung on April 12th attribute Lerch's suicide to the deep mortification caused by the loss of her husband and his lack of support. Another press report in the Gothaer Generalanzeiger contradicts: “We can certainly assure you that the divorce matter did not cause any emotional disturbances in our comrade because the application for divorce corresponded to her own wishes. The causes of the collapse are only political. "

Sonja Lerch is buried in the New Israelite Cemetery in Munich, all speeches were forbidden at the funeral, the USPD silently laid a wreath. Her tombstone was restored in 2018 on the 100th anniversary of the death of Cornelia Naumann and Günther Gerstenberg.

The writer Ernst Toller , who also came into custody after the January strike, made her fate in a slightly alienated form under the name Sonja Irene L. on the subject of his drama Masse Mensch , which premiered in 1920 at the Nuremberg Theater, on September 29, 1921 by Jürgen Fehling was staged at the Volksbühne Berlin.

In his autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland Toller took up the life of Lerch again and here separated the real person from the stage character in a crowd of people.

More recent research on the life of Sonja Lerch was carried out in 2018 by the writer Cornelia Naumann in her novel The evening comes so quickly. Sonja Lerch - Munich's forgotten revolutionary and the artist and author Günther Gerstenberg published on the basis of archive research.

Honors and exhibitions

On the 100th anniversary of her death, Sarah Sonja Lerch was honored with an elegy at the new Israeli cemetery in Munich.

The exhibition Preamble of the Peaceful Revolution in Bavaria - The Long Forgotten Revolutionary Sarah Sonja Lerch by Günther Gerstenberg and Cornelia Naumann was opened from July 24th - 25.10.2018 shown in the Munich trade union building.

In 2019 the Sarah-Sonja-Lerch-Weg in Munich-Neuperlach was named after her.

Fonts

  • On the development of the labor movement in Russia up to the great revolution of 1905 . Springer, Berlin 1913 Gießen, Phil. Diss. Digitized at the Internet Archive .

literature

  • Rabinowitz . In: Jewish Lexicon (curriculum vitae; dissertation)
  • Rabinowich . In: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 2nd edition (in this entry Sarah Rabinowitz and Sara Rabinowitsch are confused and information about both women is mixed up);
  • Jacob Scholem Hertz (Ed.): Doires Bundistn Vol. 3. Our Time, New York 1956–1968, pp. 189–191
  • Register of the University of Zurich. For Eugen Lerch see Charles Bruneau, Peter Schon (eds.): Studia Romanica: Commemorative publication for Eugen Lerch . Port, Stuttgart 1955.
  • Albert Earle Gurganus: Sarah Sonja Lerch, née Rabinowitz: The Sonja Irene L. of Toller's "Masse-Mensch" . In: German Studies Review , Vol. 28, 3, Oct. 2005, pp. 607–620
  • Cornelia Naumann: The evening is coming so quickly. Munich's forgotten revolutionary Sonja Lerch . Meßkirch 2018, ISBN 978-3-8392-2199-0 (novel)
  • Günther Gerstenberg: The short dream of peace. A contribution to the prehistory of the Munich coup in 1918 with an excursus about Sarah Sonja Lerch in Gießen by Cornelia Naumann . Lich 2018, ISBN 978-3-8684-1189-8
  • Cornelia Naumann: I still hope that happiness must be close to everyone ... Fragments of a revolutionary life of Sarah Sonja Rabinowitz . Lich 2018, ISBN 9783868411904

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Albert Earle Gurganus: Sarah Sonja Lerch, née Rabinowitz: The Sonja Irene L. of Toller's "Masse-Mensch" . German Studies Association, 2005
  2. ^ Strike movement in Munich, Jan. 1918 . Federal Archives RY 19 / II 143/3; Contains: Letters and newspaper clippings about Sonja Rabinowitsch-Lerch's suicide in the Munich-Stadelheim remand prison
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Thomas Anz: On the death of the pacifist revolutionary Sonja Lerch 100 years ago in Munich . Literaturkritik.de - Review forum, May 4, 2018
  4. ↑ Cornelia Naumann: I still hope that happiness must be close to everyone ...
  5. ↑ Cornelia Naumann: Between all chairs . On: Literaturportal-Bayern
  6. ^ Günther Gerstenberg, Cornelia Naumann: Profiles. Against Eisner, Kurt u. Comrades for treason . Lich 2017, ISBN 978-3-86841-173-7 , p. 109 ff.
  7. ↑ Günther Gerstenberg, Cornelia Naumann: Profiles, p. 16
  8. ↑ Only one week of agitation. In 1918 the Munich revolutionary Sonja Lerch excited the press. Today it is almost forgotten. (Interview by Rudolf Stumberger with Cornelia Naumann) In: Neues Deutschland from 1./2. December 2018, p. 18
  9. ↑ quoted from Anz 2018
  10. ↑ All information according to 2018
  11. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRSNeXOZrnI
  12. ↑ https://www.verdi-Kultur.de
  13. ↑ https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Kommunalreferat/geodatenservice/strassennamen/2019/sarah-sonja-lerch-weg.html

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lerch, Sonja
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rabinowitz, Sarah; Rabinowitz, Sarah Sonja; Lerch, Sonia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (USPD, SPD)
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1918
Place of death Munich