Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930)

Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930)

Käthe Schirmacher was born on 6 August 1865 in Gdansk as the child of a liberal merchant family that was at first still well-off. In the 1890s she joined the Gdansk Women's Welfare Association and came into contact with the radical wing of the German and international women's movement. The two associations 'Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine' and 'Weltbund für Frauenstimmrecht' were co-founded by her. Already as a young woman she began to travel, so she stayed in the USA for several months in 1893 on the occasion of the international women's congress in Chicago. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she acquired the 'Agrégation' (1885 to 1887), and in the following years in Zurich, where she was one of the first German women to receive a doctorate in 1895. 

In the years that followed, she was a member of the leadership of international women's movements and acted as a multilingual interpreter at women's congresses. From Paris, where she lived from 1895, she went on extensive lecture tours, worked as a correspondent for German, Austrian and French newspapers and magazines and published political writings, newspaper articles and novels.

From about 1904 Schirmacher increasingly turned to a 'völkisch', anti-democratic and anti-Semitic political context. She was involved in the 'Deutscher Ostmarkenverein', which pursued an aggressive 'Germanization policy' in the mixed-language areas of the German Reich. In 1910 she moved her permanent residence to her partner Klara Schleker in Marlow in Mecklenburg. 

Due to increasing political differences and personal conflicts, Schirmacher finally broke with international, bourgeois-liberal women's movements in 1913, but according to her self-image she remained a women's rights activist. During the First World War, she served as a war propagandist, supervised German soldiers at the front, and advocated the military service of women. In 1918 she was one of the founders of the 'German National People's Party' and in 1919 she was elected to the National Assembly of West Prussia at short notice.

In the 1920s Schirmacher had health problems, but continued to write about women's issues and the 'Ostmarkenpolitik'; in 1921 she published her autobiography "Flammen". She died on 18 November 1930 during a stay at a health resort in Merano.

For several decades Käthe Schirmacher kept in touch with countless correspondents from various political and social contexts. In addition to a multitude of documents such as manuscripts, printed works, newspaper articles, notes and diaries, Käthe Schirmacher's estate consists of a collection of about 14,000 letters.