Elisabeth Zaisser

Elisabeth "Else" Zaisser (born Elisabeth Knipp: 16 November 1898 – 15 December 1987) was a German teacher who became secretary of state and then Minister for People's Education in the East Germany.

Between 1949 and 1989 more than 130 government ministers were appointed in the German Democratic Republic. Only four were women (and one of those, Margot Honecker, was married to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party - the leader of the country). The first of the four, appointed in April 1953, was Elisabeth Zaisser.

Life Provenance and early years Elisabeth Auguste Knipp was born in Essen. Her family were from nearby Düsseldorf. Her father is variously described as a shipping clerk, a merchant and/or a businessman. and in 1926 Elisabeth joined the party. That was also the year in which the family relocated to Berlin. she went back to Moscow. or 1947 She relinquished the ministerial post "at her own wish" in October 1953. Her ministerial resignation was justified, officially, with the explanation that she had been applying her experiences of the school system in the Soviet Union without appropriately adapting them for East German conditions.

Between 1950 and 1954 Elisabeth Zaisser also sat as a member of East Germany's national parliament ("Volkskammer"). Despite her SED party membership, she sat not as a representative of the SED but as one of 20 representatives of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD). The DFD was not a conventional political party in western terms, but one of the mass organisations that received seats in the parliament based on fixed quotas assigned by the ruling party, which under the single-list voting system in operation officially secured, for its list of candidates, the votes of 99.72% of those voting in the 1950 general election. Under the Leninist system in place, political power was concentrated not in parliament nor in government ministries but in the leadership of the Party Central Committee, but the parliament with its visibly broadly based membership was nevertheless important in conferring political legitimacy on the overall power structure, and ministries were necessary for implementing Central Committee decisions. Elisabeth Zaisser's ministerial resignation in 1953 and her failure to reappear as a Volkskammer member after the 1954 general election had nothing to do with her own talents or shortcomings. It was part of Wilhelm Zaisser's dramatic fall from grace in the vicious power struggles that broke out in the wake of the June uprising.

In December 1953 Elizabeth Zaisser was given the status of one persecuted by the Nazi régime ("Verfolgter des Naziregimes" / VdN), which qualified her for a small supplementary pension. She also worked between 1953 and 1983 in an editorial function with the Volk und Wissen Verlag publishing organisation, while supplementing her income through freelance translation work.

Awards and honours 1978 Patriotic Order of Merit (gold clasp)