Cläre Jung

Cläre Jung (2 February 1892 – 25 March 1981) was a German journalist, writer and political activist.

Early life Cläre Otto enjoyed a middle-class upbringing. Her father was a feed merchant. After finishing at her single-sex secondary school she came into contact with the circle of Berlin-based expressionist poets around Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler and, most notably, Franz Pfemfert. Fritz Mierau would later describe her as "the soul and muse of the little circle". Pfemert edited a left-wing political and literary magazine called Die Aktion: Cläre Otto got to know his fellow contributors to Die Aktion, among them the restless anarchist poet Franz Jung whom she would later marry and under whose shadow, according to some evaluations, she would spend much of her life. However, her first marriage was to another Die Aktion contributor, the writer and political activist Richard Oehring: the two of them were divorced after two years, in 1917. By September 1918 she was living with Franz Jung, although it would be another ten years before the two of them got married.

Political activism during the German Revolution During the war she worked as a medical assistant at the Moabit Hospital in Berlin between 1915 and 1916. In 1916 she obtained a position as press agency secretary, work with which she continued till 1921. The book deals with the lives of Jewish people in Berlin between 1938 and 1943, swinging between resignation and hope along the route to annihilation. appeared posthumously in 1987.

Awards and honours 1979 Patriotic Order of Merit "Golden Feather" from the Union of Journalists "Badge of Honour" from the Society for German–Soviet Friendship