German politician
Minna Faßhauer (born Minna Nikolai: 10 October 1875 - 28 July 1949) was a political and feminist activist of the left. Before the First World War she campaigned for gender equality both inside and outside the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, of which she succeeded in becoming a member in 1903. During the war she was actively engaged in the anti-war Spartacus League. In the revolutionary context of 1918/19 she served as Volkskommissarin für Volksbildung ("People's Commissar for People's Education") in the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig between November 1918 and February 1919, leading admirers to identify her as the first female to serve as a minister in a German regional government.
More than a century after she served as People's Commissar for People's Education she still divides political opinion. In February 2012 a proposal was submitted by the left-wing group on the Braunschweig city council that Faßhauer should be honoured, possibly through the naming of a street in her honour. But the centre-right CDU group on the council objected that this might be construed as presenting Faßhauer as a role model for the young people. The argument nevertheless persists, underpinned by the lack of consensus over the nature and extent of Faßhauer's involvement in a series of politically related terrorist explosions, in connection with which she was several times arrested between 1920 and 1924. On at least one occasion she was convicted and sentenced to a four month jail term (which she never served, due to a wider amnesty). In 2018 the Braunschweig city fathers were persuaded to accept the designation "Frauenort Minna Faßhauer" ("literally "Women Place Minna Faßhauer""), presented on behalf of the Women's Committee of the regional branch of the DGB ("German Trades Union Confederation"). The designation is accompanied by an ambitious on-going education and information project. The campaign for recognition of Faßhauer's political achievements in her home city has done much to publicise her achievements, but there is little reason to believe that she has become less controversial in the process.
Biography.
Childhood conditioning.
Minna Nikolai was born into a working-class family in Bleckendorf (as Egeln-Nord was known before 1950), a village in the flat countryside to the south of Magdeburg. Theodor Nikolai, her father, died in 1878 when she was just 3. Between 1881 and approximately 1889 she attended the local school in the village, combining school attendance with casual work in order to support her mother's household budget. She grew up in conditions of economic hardship, leaving school in order to work in "domestic service". She would later attribute her political activism to the economic hardship and inequality that marked her own childhood. She was acutely aware that "[back then] women had no political equality".
First political engagement.
Factory work was significantly better paid, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, than any of the jobs available in the German countryside, and many rural workers were drawn to the cities as a result. Nikolai was 18 when she relocated to nearby Braunschweig in search of work and immediately found it, initially in domestic service and later in a canning factory. On 16 April 1899, at the Michaelis Church in the old town centre of Braunschweig-"Weichbild", Minna Nikolai married Johannes Georg Faßhauer, a Braunschweig blacksmith. The couple's sons Otto and Walter were born in 1903 and 1906: both lived to adulthood. Minna Faßhauer had left school still unable to read, but encouraged by the Socialist reading material that her husband gave her, it was as a young adult that she both mastered reading and became familiar with some of the political currents of the time.
Very soon she began to campaign for the rights of young working women and, in particular, for equality of treatment between the sexes. At a regional level she made a significant contribution to winning support for the lifting of the ban on political activity by women, which in theory extended across the whole of Germany till it was formally lifted in 1908 (although in practice it is clear that since at least far back as 1890, the ban had been enforced with far more vigour in some parts of Germany - and especially in Prussia - than in others. After 1918 Hermann Wallbaum, a Communist Party member and an observer of the so-called "November revolution" in Braunschweig, characterised Minna Faßhauer's political contribution during those early years as follows:
She was denigrated by the Bourgeois press as a dumb woman: can't read or write, or whatever: doesn't speak German properly ... in any case, she was an honest and energetic woman, who gave her all for the movement. She was a washerwoman, going from house to house to do folks' washing. A regular working woman at the bottom of the [social] ladder. [Yet the radical leaders] August Merges and Robert Gehrke stood closely by her: I just know that she worked her way up from the lowest level through reading etc. Various grammatical blunders in what she wrote were grossly magnified and distorted by bourgeois [commentators]".
In 1903 Minna Faßhauer became a member of the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands"/ SPD) becoming, according to her own later account, a party official. Again a principal focus of her campaigning was the abolition of the national prohibition on women becoming politically active. That goal was finally achieved in April 1908 with the passing of the so-called "Reichsvereinsgesetz" ("loosely, "National Association Law"") which standardised the regulation of political organisation - hitherto subject to a bewildering mixture of national and regional laws and regulations - across the whole of Germany.
Another issue on which, because of her own childhood experiences, Faßhauer campaigned was the care and education of workers' children. At the end of 1907 the "Bildungsverein jugendlicher Arbeiter" ("Young Workers' Educational Association") was inaugurated in Braunschweig as an SPD youth wing. The association's first president was Robert Wiebold. Other founder members who later achieved prominence as political or resistance activists included Fritz Benke and Otto Grotewohl. It is not clear whether or not Faßhauer was involved in establishing "Bildungsverein jugendlicher Arbeiter", but she was instrumental in changing its name less than a year later. In 1908 she attended the party's fifth Women's Conference which was held, that year, at Nuremberg under the joint presidency of Luise Zietz and the formidable Clara Zetkin. There were two delegates from Braunschweig: the other was Lina Behrens. Faßhauer and Behrens submitted a report to the conference in which they recommended that, in the light of recent changes in the legal situation, the "Bildungsverein jugendlicher Arbeiter" should be renamed "Bildungsverein jugendlicher Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter" ("Young female and male Workers' Educational Association"). The recommendation was accepted and the change was implemented.
Right up till the outbreak of war in July 1914 Faßhauer's principal political concern was with the demand for equal rights for women. That included the right to vote. She delivered talks on these themes and took frequent opportunities to raise them at party meetings, for example in her address the first Wolfenbüttel Women's Day on 2 March 1913. In 1913 or 1914 a "Children's Protection Commission" for Braunschweig was established. Members included Berta Schlösser, Anne Menge und Hedwig Steinbrecher along with Faßhauer herself. The commission was charged with monitoring compliance with the 1904 Child Protection Regulations, and other measures intended to support the health and cultural well-being of children.
War.
During the war years Minna Faßhauer sustained contact with August Merges who would emerged in November 1918 as the president of the revolutionary "Socialist Republic of Braunschweig". The approach of war led to a party split, because the negative consequences were all too easy to foretell. Food prices rose dramatically, while workers' wages did not. Minna Faßhauer could see no merit in the so-called "Burgfriedenspolitik" whereby leading figures in the SPD and in the trades unions aligned to it agreed to a parliamentary truce in support of a traditional vision of "Patriotism". The move was contentious from the outset: Faßhauer was drawn increasingly towards the anti-war policies and the socialist ideas represented by Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht. Faßhauer and Merges were closely aligned in respect of the war, and in 1915 they together made contact with leaders of , At a political meeting during the early months of 1916 Faßhauer protested noisily against the party's parliamentary support for further war funding and the resulting prolongation of the war, after which she was excluded from the .
In 1916 or 1917 she also joined the Braunschweig branch of the anti-war Spartacus League. In 1917 she was prominently involved in the August strike, during the course of which, at 15.00 in Wednesday 15 August, approximately 5,000 striking workers gathered for an unauthorized meeting at the "Ölper Waldhaus" in order to appoint a negotiating commission. Minna Faßhauer was one of the five members elected. She is described in reports as "party representative and President of the pro-Spartakus Women's Club".
During 1917 the tensions that had troubled the party over the leadership’s parliamentary support for the war became unsustainable. The party split. Minna Faßhauer, opposed to the war, was one of those who became a member of the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD). Her political work, at this time, included strengthening then influence of the USPD in workplaces and, where appropriate, luring members of the SPD away to the USPD. As the disastrous war neared its end she took an active part in the build-up to what became known as the "November revolution" of 1918/19. She was one of the leaders of the revolution when it erupted locally just outside Braunschweig, at Wolfenbüttel.
Braunschweig Socialist Republic.
The German republic was proclaimed in Berlin on 9 November 1918 and the emperor's abdication was announced the same day, though a more formal statement of abdication by the emperor himself - by that time in exile near Utrecht - came nineteen days later, on 28 November. Before that, on 10 November 1918 the" Workers' and soldiers' soviet" in Braunschweig marched on the and proclaimed the "Braunschweig Socialist Republic". They called for a one-party USPD state government and, in response to a proposal by Sepp Oerter who had arrived back from Leipzig two days earlier, unanimously proclaimed/selected August Merges, to be its president. Merges was a powerful orator and popular with the rioters and demonstrators who at this point controlled the streets and the parliament building of Braunschweig.
The revolutionaries drew much of their inspiration from the success of the so-called Petrograd October Revolution of the previous year, even if the finer points of Leninist constitutional theory had yet to become apparent. The governance of the "Braunschweig Socialist Republic" was to be entrusted to a council of people's commissars under the chairmanship of Sepp Oerter. The council consisted of eight men and - remarkably in the context of the times - one woman. Minna Faßhauer, aged 43 at the time, was the woman. She was given the "People's Education" portfolio. Education was the only department that had two people's commissars, possibly on account of the gender of one of them. Faßhauer's co-commissar was Jean Kautz concerning whom, other than his name, nothing is known.
Faßhauer served as People's Commissar for People's Education between 10 November 1918 and 21 February 1919. The revolutionary Braunschweig state government was then replaced by a significantly more democratic system on 22 February 1919. The new contained members both of the USPD and of the SPD. Faßhauer was not among them. Before that happened, on 22 November 1918, as People's Education Commissar, Faßhauer abolished church oversight of the schools, and reduced the age at which young people might make their own choices about religious affiliation (so-called "Religionsmündigkeit") to 14. That was only part of a more wide ranging and arguably more contentious socialist reform programme. Her decree on arrangements for History teaching, issued on 16 November 1918, placed a prohibition on the "glorification of princes" or "Incitement of popular hatred": it replaced "History of War" with "History of Culture and the Arts". That involved removing certain publications from libraries and changing or replacing school books. She also committed to set up People's Kindergartens and People's Junior Schools.
During much of the revolution year, between December 1918 and May 1919, Faßhauer sat as a USPD member of . In January 1919 she was elected to the Braunschweig regional party executive and stood for election, unsuccessfully, for election to the provisional national parliament