Baumann, Edith (1909–1973)

German political activist and one of relatively few women among the political leadership of the German Democratic Republic. Name variations: Edith Honecker. Born August 1, 1909, in Berlin, Germany; died on April 7, 1973; daughter of a bricklayer; received secondary education; became first wife of Erich Honecker, 1947; children: one daughter,Erika Honecker (a lawyer).

Worked as an activist in Social Democratic youth movement (1925–31); worked for Socialist Workers Party (1931–33); arrested and sentenced to three years' imprisonment (1933); joined Social Democratic Party (1945) and the Socialist Unity Party (1946); served as professional youth movement administrator and deputy chair of Free German Youth (1946–49); member of Central Committee of Socialist Unity Party (1946–73).

Edith Baumann was one of the few women to reach a high position in the political life of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Her social origins, which were purely working class, gave her superb credentials for her later career in what was declared "the first workers' and peasants' state in German history."

She was born in Berlin on August 1, 1909. Baumann's parents experienced the poverty and insecurity of working-class life in the years after World War I and the Great Depression that began in 1929. Despite her intelligence, Baumann was prevented by poverty from attending a university; instead, she had to take a low-paying job as a typist. In her teens and early 20s, she was active in the Social Democratic youth movement. During the depth of the depression—when Nazi stormtroopers ruled the streets of virtually all German cities—she joined the numerically small, but ideologically vigorous, Socialist Workers Party, which promised to fight Fascism more effectively than the bureaucratically paralyzed Social Democrats or the Stalinized Communists.

The imposition of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1933 led to the rapid collapse of the organized German working class. Even militant and idealistic groups like the Socialist Workers Party, of which Baumann was a member, were no match for the brutal terror tactics of Nazi brownshirts, or the more systematic regime of terror that followed, led by the SS and implemented through the horrors of concentration camps. Baumann's unit was destroyed, and she was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, serving until her release in 1936. For the rest of the Nazi era, she remained politically quiescent, although her Marxist sympathies were never crushed. As the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 brought about a revival of political life, convinced anti-Fascists like Baumann strode into the immense vacuum left by the end of Fascism. At first, she joined the revived Social Democratic Party, seeking the militancy that was lacking in the last years of German democracy in the early 1930s. In 1946, convinced that only the unity of the working class would bring about socialism in Germany, she accepted the Soviet-dictated merger of Communist and Social Democratic Parties into a Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

In the years after 1946, Baumann emerged as one of the few women to occupy a significant political post in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. From 1946 until her death, she held high positions with the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ; "Free German Youth"), the state-controlled youth organization of the GDR. Energetic and politically reliable, she rose to the position of deputy chair of the FDJ. While working for the FDJ, she met Erich Honecker, an ambitious administrator with a spotless record as an anti-Fascist who had spent ten years in a Nazi prison. Honecker was Baumann's superior in the FDJ, which led to personal intimacy as well as political compatibility. They were married in 1947, but the marriage soon crumbled when he began an affair with Margot Feist . Edith and Erich Honecker had one child, a daughter Erika, who became a lawyer.

By 1953, Baumann's marriage had ended, her energies were again concentrated almost exclusively on politics, and she had advanced to various posts in the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party. She also served uninterruptedly from 1949 to her death as a delegate to the Volkskammer ("People's Chamber"), the legislature of the GDR. She represented women's interests in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) Central Committee for a number of years and held high posts in the municipal administration of East Berlin for the last two decades of her life. Edith Baumann died on April 7, 1973.

sources:

Drechsler, Hanno. Die Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SAPD): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung am Ende der Weimarer Republik. Hanover: SOAK-Verlag, 1983.

Gast, Gabriele. Die politische Rolle der Frau in der DDR. Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, 1973.

Herbst, Andreas, Winfried Ranke and Jürgen Winkler. So funktionierte die DDR. 3 vols. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1994.

Honecker, Erich. From My Life. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981.

Wyden, Peter. Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

John Haag , Associate Professor, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia