BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Helene Lange,
Gertrud
von Sanden
Queer Places:
Bethel-Bielefeld Alter Friedhof
Bielefeld, Stadtkreis Bielefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Waldfriedhof Heerstrasse
Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Berlin, Germany
Gertrud
Bäumer (September 12, 1873 in Hohenlimburg - March
25, 1954 in Gadderbaum)
was a German women's
rights activist and politician. She
was a member of the German Democratic
Party from 1919 to 1932 and in 1920 became the first woman in Germany to
be a ministerial councillor in the
Ministry of the Interior of the German Reich. [1]
The German Federation of Women’s Associations (Bund Deustcher Frauenvereine),
the organization which forbad Alice
Salomon’s attendance at the 1915 women’s peace congress at The Hague,
featured a devoted couple, the feminist pedagogue Helene Lange,
and the writer and politician Gertrud Bäumer: Lange and Bäumer lived together
for more than 30 years and they share a ‘Grave of honour’ in a Berlin
cemetery.
Gertrud Bäumer came from a family of pastors. The great-grandfather, Wilhelm
Bäumer (1783-1848), was a pastor in Bodelschwingh
near Lütgendortmund. As a church politician, he advocated the continuation
of the presbyterial-synodal constitution in the Prussian province of
Westphalia, founded in 1815, and beyond throughout Prussia. Wilhelm Bäumer,
who corresponded with Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768-1834), thus belonged to the larger overall context of
early ecclesiastical and political constitutionalism. [2]
After the early death of her father Emil (1845-1883), ten-year-old Gertrud
moved into her grandmother's house with her mother Caroline, née Schede
(1850-1929), and her two siblings. In her memoirs, Bäumer describes the
emptiness of her mother's life and her economic dependence on kinship as a
painful but instructive experience. On the wasteland of the grandmother's
house, she writes: "Was this women's life – this spiral around one's own
axis?" [3] Her
decision to take up a profession was therefore, according to her own
statement, clear at an early stage: "I wanted to become a teacher – and had to
become a teacher for economic reasons." [4]
She attended the "Higher
Daughter School" in Halle (Saale) and
then completed the teacher seminar in Magdeburg.
From 1894 she taught at elementary schools in Halberstadt, Kamen and
Magdeburg and was able to support her mother financially. Soon after, through
the mediation of an older colleague, she established contacts with the General
German Teachers' Association (ADLV), whose chairman Helene Lange made
a great impression on her both professionally and personally. In 1898 she
moved to Berlin to take the
head teacher's examination, which was the prerequisite for starting a course
of study. At that time,
the study of women was only possible in Prussia with
the exception of the individual professors; the enrolment of
women was not officially approved until 1908. Bäumer financed her studies
herself, among other things through publication work for the women's movement;
She did not receive any support from Hoffmann's Family Scholarship, which was
granted to every male student of her relative. [5]
She studied theology, German studies, philology and economics at the
University of Berlin, where
she received her doctorate in 1904 on Goethe's Satyros.
Board of the first German Women's Congress in Berlin at the beginning of March 1912. Back row from the left: Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner, Martha Voss-Zietz, Alice Bensheimer, Anna Pappritz; Front row from left: Helene von Forster, Gertrud Bäumer, Alice Salomon.
Baumr, like many women of the time, came to the bourgeois women's
movement about her profession
as a teacher, which at first saw itself as a women's education movement.
In Berlin, she came into closer contact with Helene Lange, who was considered
the undisputed leader of the teacher movement. Shortly after her arrival in
1898, when Baumr heard through an acquaintance that Lange was increasingly
hampered in her work by an eye disease, she offered herself as an assistant.
Very quickly, not only a lively joint journalistic work developed, but also an
intense friendship, which resulted in a cohabitation that lasted until Helene
Lange's death in 1930. Long soon recognized the spiritual potential and
above-average performance of the young Gertrud Bäumer and decided to build her
up as her successor. Not least at Lange's instigation, Bäumer quickly rose to
board positions of the Federation of German Women's Associations (BDF). In
1910 she replaced Marie
Stritt as chairman, held the office until 1919 and remained the undisputed
most influential figure of the association after this time. [6] During
the war, she was instrumental in the establishment of the National
Women's Service, a charity that sought to coordinate food supplies and the
voluntary use of women within industry and business. [7]
Her main work for the women's movement was to work within the BDF and the
monthly magazine Die
Frau, which is regarded as the mouthpiece of the bourgeois women's
movement. In 1916, she and Marie
Baum took over the establishment and management (until 1920) of the
Social Pedagogical Institute in Hamburg,
a higher technical school for welfare nurses. [8] The
intensive and close cooperation with the students at that time led to
recurring meetings of the former circle in the following years.
Gertrud Bäumer was one of the representatives of a
difference feminism, who attributed the stated "female principle" to the
task of contributing to the humanization of life. Politically, she identified
with the social liberalism of
Friedrich Naumann, with whom she worked closely from 1906; From 1912 she
was editorially responsible for the cultural part of his magazine Die
Hilfe, founded in 1894. After his death in 1919, she temporarily became the
sole editor. She also
had not only a working group with Naumann, but also an intense friendship. [9]
After the amendment of the Prussian association law in 1908 (which had
previously prohibited women from entering political parties), Gertrud Bäumer
and Helene Lange joined the Freisinnigen Vereinigung, in which Naumann had
also been active since 1903. The free-thinking association later emerged from
the left-liberal Progressive
People's Party (FVP). In 1919, Bäumer, together with Naumann and others,
founded the German
Democratic Party (DDP), of which she was vice-chairman from 1920 to 1930. [10] In
1919 she moved to the Weimar
National Assembly and from 1920 to 1932 had a Reichstag mandate, of which
from 1930 to 1932 as a member of the German State Party (DStP), in which the
German Democratic Party had recently merged. She did not stand for re-election
to the Reichstag in 1932. In 1920, she was also appointed As
Ministerial Councillor to the Ministry of the Interior, where she was
responsible for the Youth Welfare and Education Units. From 1926 to 1933 she
was delegate of the Reich government to the League
of Nations in Geneva.
In 1933, after being removed from political office by the Nazis, Bäumer
turned more to historical studies, travel and literary work. In the autumn of
1933, she wrote her political autobiography Life Trail through a turn
of times,which she apparently understood as a "spiritual confrontation with
National Socialism". [11] At
the beginning of 1934, she moved with her second partner Gertrud
von Sanden to Gießmannsdorf in Silesia (today
Gosciszow). In a letter to her uncle Werner
Schede, she addressed the dilemma that her continued work under the
National Socialists would have presented her with: "So I am dismissed with
pension and also taking into account my former teacher's time. Personally,
this is the more clean solution for me. If I were in office, I would now have
to make, for example, the orders on Jewish children in schools or the
impending injunction for history lessons, which is intended to deposition
everything that has happened since the collapse [i.O.]. That would be
impossible for me." - Letter of 28 April 1933[12]
Despite the ban on speaking against
her in 1939, she continued to give lectures, especially in evangelical circles. [13] "Your
home became a meeting place for friends and a refuge for the persecuted." [14].
Against the sharp criticism of fellow contestants such as Dorothee
von Velsen, Anna
Pappritz and Marie-Elisabeth
Lüders[15] she
also decided to continue publishing her magazine Die Frau in collaboration
with Frances Magnus-von
Hausen, even though this demanded more and more concessions over time,
including the inclusion of Nazi content.
Until 1933, Gertrud Bäumer had published her daily political papers mainly
in the journal Die Hilfe. In this magazine, which was closely linked to the
DDP in terms of personnel and saw itself as a forum for the national-social
circle around Naumann, increasing attention was paid to the phenomenon of the
emerging National Socialism. When in the autumn of 1923 in Bavaria rumours
of a "March on Berlin" (modelled on Mussolini's March
on Rome) and conspiracy plans between Hitler and
parts of the Reichswehr
leadership became increasingly known, Gertrud Bäumer
described the events in Bavaria as "unscrupulous struggle for the power of
such people, to whom the empire is only worth so much as s i e in it, today as
before the world war. And the good and gullible bourgeoisie is following them
and, with the toll of its sufferings, disappointed hopes and good paternal
feelings, makes a popular movement out of a coup d'état of the old
'society'." [17]
When the so-called Hitler
coup actually took place on 9 November 1923, she commented with
resignative words: "What is worse than this tragi-comic gimmick is the fact
that this class offensive has also energised Republican parties and has broken
or paralyzed their power to defend the Republic. The economic rulers in
Germany are, at best, rational republicans." [18]
With the increasing success of the "movement", she warned that "the political
victory of this wave of sentiment [...] the German collapse [would be]. More
dangerous than these sentiments themselves is the fact that even those who do
not share them do not see all their danger." [19]
Hitler's Mein Kampf called
it an "astonishingly confused book,"[20];
their verdict on National Socialism remained negative: "National Socialism,
whatever is valuable in it, is more destructive than uplifting for so long
than its leaders act irresponsibly: irresponsibly in the demotion of
opponents, which is not restrained by any sense of truth, irresponsible in the
demagogic and falsified depiction of the German situation and the balance of
power, irresponsible in the unscrupulous 'appeal to the pig dog in man', as
was rightly said in the Reichstag, irresponsible in the unrestrained
exploitation of the inability to judge and in the abuse of the power." [21]
She herself hoped for a renewal of the center,[22] although
she was aware of the fact that the divisiveness of the parties made it
difficult to achieve a common political profile of the "middle". The basis for
them, however, always had to be "the preservation of civil freedom in the
spirit of the Reich Constitution". [23] However,
it did not reject all the ideas and goals of National Socialism from the
outset. She recognized very well that the National Socialists were successful
not only because of their "technique of mass processing"[24]. The
conglomerate of ideas as presented in the Nazi ideology addressed a variety of
different interests. There could be no discussion about the inhumane
anti-Semitism and the "internal political atrocity propaganda"[25] of
this party, which wanted to be a "movement". Undoubtedly, however, the NSDAP was
able to fill a deficit in party politics, even if only through promises.
Bäumer took seriously the emotional crisis that she believed was manifested in
the successes of the National Socialists. It was important to her to reform
parliamentarism, which in her opinion threatened to develop more and more into
small-believing particularindividualism of interests. [26]
The semantic
proximity of the terms "national-social",
as the AidCircle called itself, and the "National Socialist" of the NSDAP led
to a very special attention to this party. Gertrud Bäumer saw the main
difference, however, in the fact that in Naumann "National Socialism connected
with democracy",[27] and
was carried on in this sense. The "Epigone[n] a la Hitler", which Bäumer
called "hysterical foam bats", made them angry at their "economic-political
fantasy"[28]:
"If what is now called National Socialism, not, flattened and run away at the
same time, in his thought work remained claster-deep below the level at which
the old National Socials worked, serious youth, who in the dark time are
looking for a goal and a way, would have to find a connection here – some
individual reshaping and reshaping, but following the general idea, which
lifts socialism out of Marxist narrowness and as a task of the nation." [29]
When she had to watch the spectacle of the NSDAP deputies in party uniform at
the opening of the Reichstag on 13 October 1930, she wrote: "A hot protest
stands in one against the will to violence, which expresses itself
renommistically in the elevator of this force." [30] Gertrud
Bäumer refused to engage in a discussion of the content or even a cooperation
with the National Socialists. Rather, it is necessary to fight, "... against a
power that wants to replace the citizen with the political soldier at the
expense of respect for the living conscience of the individual and by
forcibly decommissioning all
other views – something at its core un-German, un-Germanic. Only by ruthlessly
combating this new german-people's edition of an outrageous Byzantineism will
the real and powerful of the movement be freed from a nasty and very unracial
alloy!" [31]
Bäumer's critical but ultimately lavish attitude towards National Socialism is
symptomatic of her reformist and state-supporting approach: her efforts were
to improve within systems, whatever systems they were. In the time of National
Socialism, however, she agreed to compromises that were no longer sustainable
for most of her fellow women in the women's movement. [32]
After her impeachment in 1933 and her move to Gießmannsdorf together with
Gertrud von Sanden, she devoted herself more to her writing activities and in
the following years undertook study trips to Switzerland and Italy with Ludwig
Nießen and Sanden's daughter Isabel
Hamer. In 1936 she was created in an extensive work by
Adelheid – Mother of the Kingdoms. Bäumer had believed until the very end
that, despite considerable concessions to censorship and other press
regulations, the publication of women could still convey remnants of
women-moving content – an optimism that hardly any of her former companions
still shared. In addition to self-censorship, companions such as Anna
Pappritz, Marie-Elisabeth
Lüders, Alice
Salomon and Dorothee
von Velsen also accused her of not distinguishing herself or only
insufficiently from Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1944, she and Frances Magnus-von
Hausen finally stopped the appearance of the woman due to a lack of paper. In
the winter of 1945 Bäumer fled with the grandson of her now deceased partner
to Saalfeld/Saale (Körnerstraße
6) and on to Bamberg. She
tried to participate in the political construction of the Federal Republic and
in particular in the reconstruction of a women's movement, but found that it
was precisely in the women's organizations of the post-war period that her
lavish behaviour in the era of National Socialism was interpreted as
opportunism and that her conception of women's politics was no longer
up-to-date. She was also active in the founding circle of the Christian
Social Union (CSU). Bäumer gave some lectures, especially on theological
and historical topics, but soon began to suffer from atherosclerosis, which
gradually made public activity impossible for her. Gertrud Bäumer moved with
her sister Else Bäumer (1875-1959) to Bad
Godesberg in 1949. At the beginning of 1954 she was transferred to the Bodelschwingh
institutions in Bethel (Bielefeld), where she died on 25 March. She is
buried in the local cemetery. At the grave monument of the
honorary tomb of the state of Berlin for Helene Lange at the cemetery Heerstraße in Berlin-Westend, an
inscription in memoriam reminds of Gertrud Bäumer. [33]
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