Susanne Miller

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Susanne Miller (born Strasser ; born May 14, 1915 in Sofia , Bulgaria , † July 1, 2008 in Bonn ) was a German historian .

She came from an upper class family, spent most of her childhood in Vienna and Sofia, and was involved in the socialist labor movement in her youth . After Austria's annexation to National Socialist Germany , she did not return from a stay in Great Britain because of her political views and her Jewish origins. Instead, she became involved in exile circles in London , which her later partner and husband Willi Eichler also belonged to. After the end of the Second World War , she went with him to Cologne and then to Bonn to participate in the political reconstruction of Germany. Miller worked in the 1950s as an employee of the party executive of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and participated, among other things, in the creation of the Godesberg program .

From 1960 to 1963 she continued her studies in Bonn, which she had broken off in the 1930s, and did her doctorate with a work on the history of the program on German social democracy. She then worked for the Commission on the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties . Her historical studies deal mainly with topics of the labor movement, exile and recent German history. Susanne Miller preferred approaches to political history when researching programs , ideologies and political movements . For decades she was active in a number of political and trade union organizations as well as in scientific bodies and educational institutions.

Childhood, school, youth

Susanne Miller was born in Sofia in 1915 as the daughter of Ernst Strasser, a Jewish banker, and Margarete (Margit) Strasser, née Rodosi. About 20 months later she had a sister named Georgina. In 1919 the mother died of the Spanish flu . At the age of five, Susanne was baptized as a Protestant, without religious aspects in the family, which belonged to the upper middle class, playing a major role. Ernst Strasser married again around 1920/1921. Erika and Edgar Strasser emerged from the connection with his second wife, Irene Freund. The family lived in the affluent Vienna district of Döbling from around 1920/1921 . The young Susanne Strasser noticed the great social differences in the Austrian metropolis. She was also aware of the distance between her politically conservative family and the servants .

After attending the municipal elementary school, she attended a Viennese high school , which was co - educational . At school she was particularly interested in history lessons and the treatment of ancient ideas about the “ Golden Age ”. Because Ernst Strasser received a managerial position in Sofia, the family moved to the Bulgarian capital in 1929. Susanne Strasser passed the Matura at the German secondary school there at the age of 17 .

Socialist ideas and first political activities

Inspired by conversations with her two years older cousin and with Zeko Torbov, the philosophy teacher at the German secondary school in Sofia, Susanne Strasser began to deal with socialist ideas. The focus was on the ideas of Leonard Nelson , the founder and thought leader of the International Socialist League (ISK). Nelson was strongly influenced by neo-Kantianism . The ISK members justified their commitment to socialism not with Marxist theories, but with ethical motives.

During a fortnightly trip to Berlin at the end of 1932, Susanne Strasser made targeted contact with the ISK supporters there. These included her future husband Willi Eichler as well as Gustav Heckmann and Helmut von Rauschenplat . After her return, she did not immediately start studying in Vienna, but completed a social internship lasting several weeks. During this time she got to know the living conditions in the Viennese working-class districts such as Favoriten , Ottakring and Floridsdorf .

She then began studying history , English and philosophy at the University of Vienna . She was impressed by the professors whose events she attended, Max Adler , the theoretician of the Austrian socialists, and the philosopher Heinrich Gomperz . During this time she joined the Socialist Student Union , to which only a minority of fellow students belonged. However, anti-Semitic tendencies within this association prevented them from associative activities.

The February uprising in 1934 was more formative for them . The violent conflict between the Austrofascist state apparatus under Engelbert Dollfuss and the Social Democratic Workers' Party lasted three days in Vienna and also ended here with the defeat of the Social Democrats. After the end of the violent conflict, Strasser took part in the distribution of donations from Great Britain and the United States to families from the Viennese working class who were in need because their families' income had fallen due to deaths, injuries or arrests. During this relief operation, she got to know, among others, the later Austrian Minister of the Interior, Josef Afritsch and Alma Seitz, the wife of Karl Seitz , who had served as mayor in the former red Vienna .

Stays in England and exile

In the mid-1930s Susanne Strasser went to London twice, each for a few summer weeks. There she worked on an au pair basis in a home of the Methodist Church . During this time she made contact with people in London connected to the ISK. These included Jenny and Walter Fliess, who ran a vegetarian restaurant in the City of London in order to support the German resistance against National Socialism with the surpluses . During her third stay in England in 1938, she finally worked in this restaurant. After Austria was annexed to the Third Reich in the same year, she did not return to Vienna.

Miller lived through World War II in London. There she belonged to the socialist emigrant scene. This group included Willi Eichler , who came from Paris to the British capital shortly before the outbreak of war . The long-time ISK chairman Minna Specht also lived and worked there during the war years. Another leader in this group was Maria Hodann , the former wife of the sex reformer and eugenicist Max Hodann . Susanne Miller herself gave a series of lectures to women from the British cooperative movement and the National Council of Labor during the war years . The content of these lectures was mostly the events on the European continent and especially in Germany. From 1944 onwards, Susanne Miller no longer worked in the vegetarian restaurant, but instead, together with Willi Eichler, devoted herself to genuinely political questions, in particular writing speeches and political concepts for post-war Germany.

Their political work resulted in meetings with members of Jewish organizations such as the "Bundisten", ie the members of the General Jewish Workers' Union . One of these acquaintances was Szmul Zygielbojm , who had spoken out vehemently against the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto and was a member of the Polish government in exile in London. Motivated by these encounters, Susanne Miller was later to publish some publications about the Bundists.

Until the British victory in the Battle of Britain , there were concerns among emigrants that a German invasion might occur. In this case, some of the female exiles tried to conceal their identities: They married in order to obtain a different name and British citizenship . Susanne Strasser entered into such a marriage of convenience with Horace Milton Sydney Miller, an English officer and Labor politician, in September 1939 and henceforth kept the name Miller. The marriage was divorced again in July 1946.

Political work in post-war Germany

Like many other exiles, Willi Eichler and Susanne Miller returned to Germany after the end of the war to take part in the political reconstruction. At the initiative of Cologne Social Democrats, particularly through the mediation of Werner Hansen , Eichler was appointed editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung , which appears in this city, in early 1946 . Susanne Miller followed him in April 1946, and in the same month she joined the SPD. The ISK had already disbanded at the end of 1945, and like Miller, most of its members were now Social Democrats.

In her local association Cologne-South she was elected to the management. Soon afterwards she became chairwoman of the SPD women in the Middle Rhine district. In this role she organized educational events for women in the 1950s. Some of these events were also aimed at women from neighboring party districts as well as from neighboring countries Belgium , Luxembourg and the Netherlands . Through this office she got into the central women's committee of the party in 1948. In this committee she made contact with other important SPD politicians such as Herta Gotthelf , Elisabeth Selbert , Luise Albertz , Annemarie Renger and Louise Schroeder .

Its activities in the Social Democratic education participation was one of the building of the Socialist educational community in Cologne, for the next to Eichler and the subsequent North Rhine-Westphalian Minister President Heinz Kühn and his wife Marianne and Gerhard Weisser inserting. Susanne Miller and Marianne Kühn were responsible for planning the lecture program and selecting the appropriate speakers, including Wolfgang Leonhard and Heinrich Böll . Miller was also involved in the reconstruction of the Philosophical-Political Academy , which took part in political and social discussions after 1949 and thus continued Nelson's thoughts. Decades later, from 1982 to 1990, Susanne Miller was chairman of this academy.

In 1951, Susanne Miller and Willi Eichler moved to Bonn because Eichler had been elected to the paid SPD party executive. Shortly after the move, Miller became Eichler's employee and thus a paid employee of the SPD party executive. After the defeat of the SPD in the Bundestag election of 1953, Eichler became chairman of the program commission at the SPD party congress in Berlin in 1954, which was supposed to work out a new party program. Susanne Miller experienced the development of this program up close, because she had to take minutes of the meetings of the program committee and to summarize the extensive discussions. As a result, this new program, which went down in party history in 1959 as the Godesberg program, led to the reorientation of the party. It no longer saw itself as a Marxist class party, but as a people 's party ; the market economy was no longer rejected but welcomed.

Resumption of studies, marriage

After the Godesberg program was adopted at the end of 1959, Susanne Miller decided to resume studies that she had broken off in 1934 at the age of eighteen. The now 45-year-old studied history, political science and education at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in 1960 . After about two and a half years of study, she began preparing for her dissertation . With Karl Dietrich Bracher she did her doctorate in 1963 with a thesis on the development of the party programs of the German social democracy. In this study, she analyzed the program development from Ferdinand Lassalle and the General German Workers' Association to Eduard Bernstein and the revisionism dispute in the 1890s. She dedicated her work to Minna Specht.

In October 1965 she married Willi Eichler, which gave her German citizenship in 1967 .

Academic activities

After graduation, Susanne Miller initially considered working in the library of the SPD party executive. But she did not implement these plans. Nor did she accept the offer to work at the International Textbook Institute in Braunschweig . She stayed in Bonn and in 1964 became an employee of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties . In this non-university research institution she worked her entire further professional life until 1978. She initially worked on source editions. This included the war diary of the Social Democratic Reichstag member Eduard David and a volume of sources on the government of the People's Representatives . Miller then published studies on the development of German social democracy during the First World War and on the first, social democratic-led governments in the Weimar Republic . The first of these two studies, Burgfrieden and Klassekampf , is still considered a standard work to this day.

In 1974 she published a short history of the SPD together with Heinrich Potthoff . This font was designed for internal party educational work. In 2002 the eighth edition of this work was published, the number of which grew from 350 to just under 600.

Political-academic engagement

From the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, Susanne Miller also acted as a liaison lecturer at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and as a member of the committee that decided which of the applications for study grants was approved. Before that, she had often been a seminar leader and speaker at events organized by this party-affiliated foundation. In addition to these activities, Susanne Miller has undertaken a number of study and lecture tours on behalf of the foundation, which have taken her to Japan , China , Israel and Poland , among others .

Miller also dealt with questions of German-German cooperation. She was a member of the SPD Fundamental Values ​​Commission when this committee met with members of the Academy for Social Sciences at the SED Central Committee in order to write the so-called SPD-SED paper from 1984 to 1987. This document thematized ideological differences between the two political systems in West and East Germany, which had previously always been excluded from German-German relations . Although Susanne Miller was open to this form of dialogue with the Unity Socialists, she was not prepared to tolerate the crimes and human rights violations for which she held the communists directly responsible. In this sense she explicitly saw herself as an anti-communist .

In 1982 Peter Glotz , the then federal manager of the SPD, made Susanne Miller chairman of the historical commission of the SPD party executive . Under the direction of Miller, this body organized a number of events on topics from recent German history and published a number of relevant brochures. The most important event that she was able to organize as chairwoman was a public meeting in March 1987 in the foyer of the Erich-Ollenhauer-Haus with historians from the GDR . This event should serve the exchange about the "legacy of German history". The media of the Federal Republic reported intensively on this conference because this exchange of ideas was perceived as very unusual by Western and Eastern historians due to the ideological contrasts. Susanne Miller was already familiar with dealing directly with GDR historians, since she had been a participant in the annual international conference of historians of the labor movement in Linz since 1964 .

In addition to this work in party-affiliated institutions, Susanne Miller was involved in the Federal Agency for Civic Education . Together with Thomas Meyer , for example, she was responsible for the scientific project management of a working group of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, which developed a three-volume learning and workbook on the history of the German labor movement for the federal headquarters. She herself was represented in it with several contributions. In addition, Miller was a member of the scientific advisory board of this educational institution. According to her own assessment, she succeeded there for many years, together with representatives from the ranks of the CDU and the FDP , in shaping and accompanying political education work across party lines. She left this institution when the party dispute there made rational discourses and factual work more and more difficult.

In 1996, Susanne Miller became the federal chairwoman of the working group of formerly persecuted social democrats . Before that, she was a board member of this victims' association. During her term of office in June 1998, she helped to ensure that social democrats who had suffered political persecution in the GDR could also become members in addition to those persecuted by the Nazi regime.

Miller's public engagement included her work and membership in the German-Israeli Society as well as her diverse contributions to the journalistic and political public. For example, on the occasion of the first publication of a biographical text by Sebastian Haffner, she vigorously intervened against his condemnation of leading social democratic politicians, whom Haffner had accused of betraying the November Revolution. In addition, she has demanded reparation payments from the German government and the German economy for former forced laborers and complained about the lack of consideration of the expertise of victims' associations. She also took part in the discussion process about the Berlin Holocaust Memorial .

Other memberships and collaboration

During her exile, Susanne Miller worked in the Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain and was an active member of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). In Germany she joined the public services, transport and traffic union , later the education and science union and the association of German writers . At the Institute of German history of Tel Aviv University , she worked as a consultant. Miller also served on the Haifa University Board of Governors .

Honors

Street sign in Röttgen (July 2016)

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia awarded her the title of professor in 1985 at the age of 70. In November 2004, the Georg von Vollmar Academy awarded Miller the Waldemar von Knoeringen Prize for her services to strengthening democracy and strengthening historical awareness . The Bonn district council decided in November 2013 to name a street in a new development in the Röttgen district after Susanne Miller. In her memory, the Philosophical-Political Academy and the Archive of Social Democracy held a symposium on June 25, 2015 in Bonn .

Bibliographies

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ cf. Press release: Kurt Beck pays tribute to Susanne Miller ( memento from November 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) at spd.de, July 1, 2008 (accessed on July 1, 2008)
  2. ↑ Death Notice: GEORGINA GRONNER ( Chicago Tribune , February 6, 2008, accessed May 14, 2015)
  3. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 13-20.
  4. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 20–29.
  5. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 35–52.
  6. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live like this again , pp. 53–57.
  7. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 61–63.
  8. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 68–70.
  9. ↑ She changed her name to Mary Saran in England . See Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , p. 71.
  10. ↑ Susanne Miller: So I would live again , pp. 71, 74–76, 83 f, 99 f.
  11. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 86–90.
  12. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , p. 99.
  13. ↑ Heinrich Potthoff: A life for freedom and social democracy - Susanne Miller (1915-2008) , p. 230.
  14. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 101-105.
  15. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live again like this , pp. 110 f, 114–116.
  16. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live like this again , p. 126 f.
  17. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , p. 105.
  18. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 129-136. For the significance of the Godesberg program, see Detlef Lehnert, Social Democracy Between Protest Movement and Government Party 1848 to 1983 ( Edition Suhrkamp , Vol. 1248 = NF, Vol. 248, Neue Historische Bibliothek), Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, pp. 184–191, ISBN 3-518-11248-1 and Heinrich August Winkler , The long way to the west, vol. 2: German history from the “Third Reich” to reunification , Beck, Munich 2000, p. 199, ISBN 3-406-46002-X .
  19. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live again like this , pp. 110 f, 145–148.
  20. ↑ See Susanne Miller: The Problem of Freedom in Socialism. Freedom, state and revolution in the social democratic program from Lassalle to the revisionism dispute . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1964.
  21. ↑ Heinrich Potthoff: A life for freedom and social democracy - Susanne Miller (1915-2008) , p. 235, footnote 20.
  22. ↑ Susanne Miller (arr.), In connection with Erich Matthias : The war diary of the Reichstag member Eduard David 1914 to 1918 . (= Sources on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. On behalf of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties, edited by Werner Conze and Erich Matthias, Series 1: From the constitutional monarchy to the parliamentary republic , vol. 4), Droste, Düsseldorf 1966.
  23. ^ The Government of the People's Representatives 1918/19 . Single by Erich Matthias. Edited by Susanne Miller (= sources on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Series 1, From the constitutional monarchy to the parliamentary republic ), Droste, Düsseldorf 1969.
  24. ^ Susanne Miller: Burgfrieden and class struggle. German social democracy in the First World War . Edited by the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties , vol. 53), Droste, Düsseldorf 1974.
  25. ↑ Susanne Miller: The burden of power. German Social Democracy 1918–1920 . Edited by the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties , vol. 63), Droste, Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-7700-5095-9 .
  26. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live again like this , pp. 110 f., 153–156. Assessment of the work "Burgfrieden and class struggle" for example by Rainer Traub: The Debacle of the Labor Movement . In: Spiegel Spezial , 1/2004, pp. 114–117, here p. 117.
  27. ↑ Detlef Lehnert: Social Democracy , p. 14.
  28. ↑ Susanne Miller, Heinrich Potthoff: Brief history of the SPD. 1848-2002 . 8th, updated and expanded edition, Dietz Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-8012-0320-4 .
  29. ↑ Susanne Miller: So I Would Live Again , pp. 160, 165–167, 170–173.
  30. ↑ On this paper see Rolf Reissig: Magna Carta der DDR-Perestroika. 15 years of SPD-SED paper . in: Friday 23 August 2002.
  31. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live again like this , pp. 176–181. For more on Miller's anti-communist self-image, see pp. 65 and 178 f.
  32. ↑ See Bernd Faulenbach : 25 Years of the Historical Commission of the SPD , press release of February 5, 2007 on the SPD's website ( Memento of November 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  33. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live again like this , pp. 182-184.
  34. ↑ For this conference see the excerpt from the essay by Helmut Konrad: Does the history of the labor movement as a discipline have a future? On the status of the discussion about a reorientation of the ITH . In: International Scientific Correspondence on the History of the German Labor Movement (IWK) Issue 1/1999, pp. 123–127. See also the brief information in the run-up to an anniversary event of this network: "50th anniversary of the International Conference of Historians of Workers' and Other Social Movements (ITH)" on a website of the City of Vienna (accessed on September 20, 2014).
  35. ^ Thomas Meyer, Susanne Miller, Joachim Rohlfes (eds.): History of the German workers' movement. Study and work book. Presentation, chronology, documents . Federal Agency for Civic Education , Bonn 1984, ISBN 3-923423-11-X .
  36. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 192–196. Miller himself was a target of criticism. Wolfgang Maurus, a director of the federal headquarters appointed by the CSU , protested against a brochure written by Miller, in which she considered political resistance to the state to be justified in certain situations. Maurus turned on the Ministry of the Interior , which did not follow his demand for censorship. See: Completely squalid. The Federal Agency for Civic Education: A Bonn authority as booty from the parties . In: Completely slutty . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1992, pp. 49 ( online ).
  37. ↑ Susanne Miller: I would live again like this , pp. 197–203. At the time of the integration of the Social Democrats persecuted in the GDR, see the documentation An interim balance sheet of the coming to terms with the Soviet Zone / GDR dictatorship 1989–1999 . X. Bautzen Forum of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Leipzig Office, May 7 and 8, 1999, p. 14 (greeting from S. Miller). Friedrich Ebert Foundation (PDF, 390 kB)
  38. ↑ Susanne Miller: This is how I would live again , pp. 188–191.
  39. ↑ Sebastian Haffner: History of a German. The memories 1914–1933 , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-421-05409-6 .
  40. ↑ See The Treason .
  41. ↑ See Charlotte Wiedemann: Cheap Fron. Shameful course of a historic mission: How politics and industry deal with the demands of former forced laborers , in: Die Woche , June 18, 1999.
  42. ↑ See, for example, Miller's letter to the editor in Der Spiegel , No. 37/1998, p. 8.
  43. ↑ I would live like this again , pp. 173, 211 f.
  44. ↑ Democracy Prize for historian Miller . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 22, 2004.
  45. ^ Susanne-Miller-Straße in the Bonn street cadastre
  46. ↑ Information about the conference on the corresponding invitation card; Renate Faerber-Husemann: Susanne Miller: A star for everyone who knew her , amount in Vorwärts from June 29, 2015.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 30, 2007 .
personal data
SURNAME Miller, Susanne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Miller, Susi; Miller, Sjuzanna; Miller-Eichler, Susanne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Sofia
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 2008
Place of death Bonn