Berta Lask

Berta Lask (; 17 November 1878 – 28 March 1967) was a German writer, playwright and journalist. She joined the Communist Party in 1923 and much of her published work is strongly polemical.

Sources identify her under several different names. Between her marriage to Louis Jacobsohn in 1901 and 1917 she used, for some purposes, the name Berta Jacobsohn. After the death of both her brothers in law, the couple changed their name to Jacobsohn-Lask. She also wrote under the pseudonym "Gerhard Wieland".

Life

Provenance and early years Berta Lask was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Wadowitz, a small industrialising town at that time in Galicia, and a short distance to the southwest of Kraków. She was the third of her parents' four recorded children. Her parents had grown up in the north of Germany, and despite living in Austria-Hungary still held Prussian nationality. Her father, Leopold Lask (1841–1905), owned a paper factory in Falkenberg, far to the north. Her mother, Cerline Lask (?-1921) was a teacher. The elder of her brothers, Emil Lask (1875–1915), would achieve eminence as a neo-Kantian philosopher.

In 1885 the family moved to Falkenberg in Brandenburg.

Through her husband's work as a doctor Lask became increasingly radicalised, which formed the context for her activism in the women's movement and later her support for the October Revolution in Leningrad in 1917 and the November Revolution in Berlin in 1918. After the war, between 1919 and 1921 she entitled two volumes of poetry reflective of the war experience and the deaths of her own brothers entitled "Stimmen" ("Voices") and "Rufe aus dem Dunkel" ("Calls out of the dark"). and children's books such as "Through Time on the Flying Horse" ("Auf dem Flügelpferde durch die Zeiten") and "How Franz and Greta traveled to Russia" ("Wie Franz und Grete nach Russland reisten"). She had made her own first visit to Russia in 1925. Along with Johannes R. Becher, Frida Rubiner, Franz Carl Weiskopf and others she was a member of the planning committee and a founder member of the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors ("Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller" / BPRS) which they launched on 19 October 1928, with Lask becoming deputy secretary to the national executive in 1932.

In Moscow Berta Lask worked as a journalist. Moscow, like Paris, had welcomed large numbers of refugees from Nazi Germany, forced to flee because of their politics, their race, or both. There were several German language news publications following the Communist Party line, notably the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, published in Moscow by the German language section of the Comintern, and to which Lask contributed. It has been suggested that she used a pseudonym partly in order to protect her sons and her husband all of whom had initially remained in Germany when Berta had fled.

Berta Lask was deprived of her German citizenship by the government in 1938. The other two, Hermann and Ludwig, were arrested in 1938, when the political purges in Moscow were still at their height. The middle son, Hermann, was banned to Arkhangelsk in the north where he lived with his widowed mother between 1941 and 1944. He was eventually transferred to the Soviet "Labor army", and returned to what remained in Germany in 1948. In 1958 she was honoured officially with the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver. She was a member of the East German literary elite, and the country's powerful Party Central Committee offered public condolences when she died on 28 March 1967.