Cilly Schäfer

Cäcilie "Cilly" Schäfer (born Cäcilie Tannenberg: 25 January 1898 - 18 January 1981) was a German politician (Communist Party of Germany). During the twelve Nazi years her political activities became illegal and she spent much of the time in state detention, which she survived.

Life Cäcilie "Cilly" Barbara Tannenberg was born in Friedberg, a small manufacturing town north of Frankfurt. Her father, Friedrich August Gustav Tannenberg, was a shoe maker. There were four siblings. After leaving school she trained and qualified for work in the garment industry. Cilly Schäfer herself was elected a member of the Landtag in 1931. and set to work in a munitions factory. A different emphasis comes from another source which states that in April 1945 she was one of a group of concentration camp inmates sent on one of the notorious death marches. She managed to escape back home to Hesse. By early May 1945 Nazi Germany was over: Cilly and Jakob Schäfer now settled back in Marburg which was being administered as part of the US occupation zone.

In Marburg she worked in the all-party Women's Committee, one of the first public associations to be approved by the US military authorities. The organisation concerned itself with practical reconstruction and the distribution of food parcels to the destitute. She also led a sewing workshop in one of the city schools and became a volunteer official of the no longer illegal Communist Party. By May 1949 basic democratic structures had been restored and the US occupation zone, merged with the British and French occupation zones, was relaunched as the US sponsored German Federal Republic (West Germany): in 1951 Cilly Schäfer and her husband were both voted on to the local council ("Marburger Stadtparlament"). She was also a founder member of the Marburg branch and an active participant in the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime ("Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" / VVN).

During the 1950s, partly in response to economic success in West Germany and partly as a reaction to the increasingly confrontational approach taken by the authorities in the former Soviet occupation zone, which had been reinvented in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), support for the Communist Party fell away dramatically in West Germany: in August 1956 it was banned by the West German Constitutional Court. In 1968 it was reconstituted and relaunched, now identified as the German Communist Party ("Deutsche Kommunistische Partei" / DKP). It never regained the levels of support that the former communist party had enjoyed across Germany before 1933, but in 1968 Cilly and Jakob Schäfer were among the first to sign up to the "new" German Communist Party.

Cilly Schäfer was widowed in 1971. She herself died in Marburg on 18 January 1981, one week short of what would have been her 83rd birthday. In 1988 the house where she had lived with her husband, officially known at the time as the "Jakob-Schäfer-Haus", was renamed as the "Cilly-und-Jakob-Schäfer-Haus". A street was named after her. All this appears to have come about because, among opinion formers in the city, an exhibition focusing on women in the Landtag (regional legislature) increased awareness of Cilly Schäfer's contribution.