Thekla Kauffmann

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thekla Kauffmann (born January 18, 1883 in Stuttgart ; † December 21, 1980 in New York ) was a politician ( DDP ) and from 1919 to 1920 the only Jewish member of parliament in Württemberg .

Life

Kauffmann was born the daughter of a Jewish factory owner. Before the First World War, she worked with the Association for Women's Suffrage . In 1919 she was elected to the Constituent Assembly of Württemberg for the DDP . She worked on the Petitions Committee and the Special Committee on the drafting of a Youth Welfare Act. However, with her second candidacy she failed and so she withdrew from state politics in 1920. In 1931 she ran for the Stuttgart municipal council on an all-women list, which, however, did not win a mandate.

Thekla Kauffmann set up a support center for women’s work at the Stuttgart employment office and a new department for women. After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, she was released.

Kaufmann now worked as a social worker at the welfare office of the Stuttgart Israelite community . She headed the regional emigration commission of the Aid Association of Jews in Germany and cooperated with the US consulate in Stuttgart, which was responsible for the west and south of the German Reich and therefore had to process the large number of immigration applications from German Jews who were forced to emigrate.

In 1941, shortly before the start of the deportation of German Jews , she and her mother fled to France and from there to the USA. In Chicago, she ran a home for working mothers, and later worked in the local library. She spent her retirement from 1960 with her sister in New York.

Fonts

  • Thekla Kauffmann: German-Jewish Children's Aid , translated excerpt from: Emigration: Memories 1933-1947. In: Andreas Lixl-Purcell (Ed.): Women of Exile: German-Jewish Autobiographies since 1933 . Westport: Greenwood, 1988, ISBN 0-313-25921-6 , pp. 45-49

literature

  • Ina Hochreuther: Women in Parliament - Southwest German MPs since 1919 , Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 1992
  • Frank Raberg : Biographical handbook of the Württemberg state parliament members 1815-1933 . On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-016604-2 , p. 421 .
  • Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 .
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 355
  • Wolfgang Niess: Thekla Kauffmann. Obligation to fellow human beings in difficult times. In: Women in the German Southwest , ed. by Birgit Knorr and Rosemarie Wehling, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 978-3-17-012089-1 , pp. 180-185.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ina Hochreuther: Women in Parliament. Southwest German parliamentarians from 1919 until today . 3. Edition. Stuttgart 1912, ISBN 978-3-923476-16-9 , pp. 79 .
personal data
SURNAME Kauffmann, Thekla
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Württemberg politician (DDP), Member of the State Parliament 1919/20
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1980
Place of death new York