Ursula Hirschmann

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Ursula Hirschmann (born September 2, 1913 in Berlin , † January 8, 1991 in Rome ) was a German anti-fascist activist and advocate of European federalism .

life and career

Ursula Hirschmann was the daughter of the bourgeois Jewish assistant doctor Carl Hirschmann (born September 9, 1880) and his wife Hedwig Lea Henriette, b. Marcuse (April 11, 1880), who married on August 19, 1911 in Berlin.

She studied economics at the Humboldt University in Berlin together with her brother Albert O. Hirschman , who later became a Nobel Prize winner . In 1932 she joined the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party in order to take part in the resistance against the advance of the Nazis .

In the summer of 1933 Ursula and her brother emigrated to Paris , where they reunited with Eugenio Colorni , a young Italian philosopher and socialist whom they had already met in Berlin. From Paris they moved on to Trieste , Colorni's hometown, where she married him in 1935. They had three daughters, Silvia, Renata and Eva, who married the Indian economist Amartya Sen in 1973 .

The couple became involved in the secret anti-fascist opposition. In 1939 Eugenio was arrested and imprisoned on the island of Ventotene . Ursula followed her husband there, but since she was not held in captivity , she was able to travel back to the mainland .

Eugenio Colorni's other prisoners and friends on Ventotene included Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli , who wrote the famous Ventoten Manifesto "for a free and united Europe" in 1941 . H. an early sketch of a democratic European Union after the war . The manifesto, which was secretly written on cigarette paper, was a political declaration and basis for a democratic European federation. The content was both social reforms and a new political system and the authors also called for a break with old Europe. Ursula managed to bring the text of the manifesto to the mainland and participate in its dissemination. On August 27th and 28th, 1943, she participated in Milan a . a. with Altiero Spinelli on the founding of the European Federalist Movement .

The manifesto ended with these words:

The moment has come to throw obsolete ballast overboard and be ready for the coming upheaval, which is so completely different from what we had imagined. The inept among the old must be weeded out and new energies awakened among the young. ...

Ursula Hirschmann's husband Eugenio Colorni, who escaped Ventotene in 1943, was murdered by fascists in Rome in May 1944 . Thereafter, Altiero Spinelli became Ursula's second husband. The couple went to Switzerland and from there to Rome, where they settled after the war. In Paris in 1945 the two took part in the organization of the first “ international federal congress ”. 20 years later Ursula Hirschmann founded the association “ Femmes pour l'Europe ” in Brussels . In the first days of December 1965, she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage , followed by aphasia , from which she was never to fully recover . She died in 1991 at the age of 77.

She also had three daughters with her second husband, Diana, Barbara and Sara Spinelli.

Web links

literature

  • Silvana Boccanfuso (Author): Ursula Hirschmann - Una donna per l'Europa , ISBN 9788898607280 , 2019, 288 pages.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marriage register of the Berlin registry offices 1874 - 1920, Landesarchiv, Berlin, In: Ancestry.com
  2. ^ The Ventotene Manifesto (1941). Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Ursula Hirschmann - For a federal Europe
  4. ↑ Ursula Hirschmann. Una donna per l'Europa. Retrieved September 14, 2019 (Italian).
personal data
SURNAME Hirschmann, Ursula
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spinelli, Ursula
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German activist
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1991
Place of death Rome